They applied for antitrust immunity in 1997 and 2001 from the United States Department of Transport, but on both occasions the regulator said they had to give up a large number of landing slots at Heathrow, a price that British Airways considered too high to pay.

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Each machine will support hard drives as large as 180 gigabytes and will have slots for up to four drives, giving them a maximum storage capacity of 720 gigabytes.

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