By the standards of the rest of the industry, the circuit pattern is quite crude, and the transistor is 25 times as large as those found in conventional, modern chips.

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One reason is that seasonal adjustment is tricky in such countries where the shift from agriculture to industry changes the pattern of seasonality over time, says Mr Kroeber.

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Whoever signs the contract first sets the pattern for the rest of the industry.

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Over the past 40 years, the airline industry has fallen into a pattern of cyclical bankruptcies, the root cause of which is our unstable dollar.

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In fact, one may argue that the industry pattern for decades has been a cycle of booms and busts.

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TBM's founder, Anand Sharma, is convinced that the car industry will gradually move to a pattern where most of a car will be made in modules that are simply snapped together in small assembly lines close to the consumer, where details can be adapted to local tastes.

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It was precisely this pattern that gave rise to the biggest merger in the history of the aerospace industry, the 1997 combination of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.

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As DOJ gains expertise related to such industry usage and establishes a pattern of addressing issues common to different investigations in the same manner over time, the lives of outside counsel inevitably will become easier.

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When the pattern was repeated the next year with charges of market timing and late trading in the mutual-fund industry, rival regulators again attacked Mr. Spitzer's office.

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