neeraj123
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The active-play phenomenon started by Wii Sports now spreads to your whole body thanks to Wii Fit and the pressure-sensitive Wii Balance Board, which comes bundled with it. Used together players will experience an extensive array of fun, dynamic and surprisingly challenging activities, including aerobics, yoga, muscle stretches and balance oriented games. The focus of these activities is towards providing a "core" workout, a popular exercise method that emphasizes slower, controlled motions, but it's the fun approach to fitness of Wii Fit that will keep players hooked on fitness for years to come.
'Wii Fit' game logo
Have fun while you get fit
The Wii Balance Board
The Wii Balance Board.
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Calculate your BMI and Wii Fit age
Calculate your BMI and Wii Fit age.
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Enjoy a wide variety of mini-games
Enjoy a wide variety of mini-games.
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Follow your own personal trainer
Follow your own personal trainer.
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Track your progress against friends
Track your progress against friends.
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The Wii Fit Balance Board
The primary tenet of Wii Fit is balance. Your center of balance, the point between your left and right sides when you stand upright, has a lot to do with your health. Those without an even center of balance will be unnaturally compensating for this imbalance, which causes their posture to become misaligned, increasing the possibility of putting unnecessary strain on their bodies. This is where the Wii Balance Board comes in.
Similar in appearance to a step aerobics board, the Wii Balance Board is much, much more. Easily capable of supporting weights up to a maximum of 300 pounds, it is sturdy and precise, able to measure weight and register pressure accurately when placed on a variety of flat surfaces. This advanced level of sensitivity allows for both the wide range of activities found in the Wii Fit software as well as the board's amazing ability recognize individual players by their weight alone.
Getting Started: Create a Profile
Before you jump into doing exercises and activities, you’ll start by creating a profile. This is done easily and intuitively by simply choosing a Mii, entering your height and age information, and doing a few quick tests that will serve as a baseline for your new Wii fitness regimen. These tests are:
* BMI Check: BMI, or Body Mass Index, is a measure of body fat based on height and weight that is the standard used by agencies such as the World Health Organization and the National Institute of Health. To check your BMI, you’ll enter your height then stand on the Wii Balance Board and let it read your weight.
* Wii Fit Age: After you’ve checked your BMI, you’ll do a basic balance test and find out your current Wii Fit Age. This basic balance test measures how well you can control your left and right balance. Based on the results, you’ll be assigned a Wii Fit Age.
Four Categories of Fun
Once you have created your profile it's time to have some fun. Wii Fit features four main categories of exercises to choose from: Strength Training, Aerobics, Yoga and Balance Games. Wii Fit will guide you through the first three with the help of your own virtual personal trainer, while the balance games offer variety and fun to help keep you engaged and excited about your fitness goals. In addition, as you spend time exercising, you’ll earn Fit Credits that unlock additional exercises and activities within your favorite categories that will allow you to continue to push yourself. See more detail on the four categories below:
* Strength Training: Put your strength to the test with muscle-toning exercises like Single Leg Extension, Sideways Leg Lift, Arm and Leg Lift, Single-Arm Stand, Torso Twists, Rowing Squat, Single Leg Twist, Lunge, Push-Up and Side Plank, Jackknife, Plank and Tricep Extension. Challenges include Push-Up Challenge, Plank Challenge and Jackknife Challenge.
* Aerobics: Get your heart pumping with fun, interactive Aerobic exercises like Hula Hoop, Basic Step, Basic Run, Super Hula Hoop, Advanced Step, 2-P Run, Rhythm Boxing, Free Step and Free Run.
* Yoga: Work on your balance and flexibility with Yoga poses and activities like Deep Breathing, Half-Moon, Dance, Cobra, Bridge, Spinal Twist, Shoulder Stand, Warrior, Tree, Sun Salutation, Standing Knee, Palm Tree, Chair, Triangle and Downward-Facing Dog.
* Balance Games: Get into the action with fun, balanced-based games like Soccer Heading, Ski Slalom, Ski Jump, Table Tilt, Tightrope Walk, Balance Bubble, Penguin Slide, Snowboard Slalom and Lotus Focus.
Keep Track of Your Progress
Because keeping fit is an ongoing process, Wii Fit also tracks the activities you do the most and puts them into your Favorites category. With this information players can note exercises and activities that they are strong in, as well as others that may need to improve at. Some of the ways players can use this information for are to:
* Keep tabs on your daily progress with easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Using your personal profile, you can set goals, view a graph of your BMI results over time, see how many Fit Credits you’ve earned, check your Wii Fit Age and even enter exercise time you’ve done outside of Wii Fit. It’s all about coming back and exercising a little every day, and the personal profile makes tracking your daily progress simple and easy.
* Quickly check your Wii Fit Age and BMI without even putting the game in the console by going directly to the Wii Fit Channel.
* Allow up to eight family members can create their own profiles in Wii Fit. On the profile-selection screen, everyone in the family can see each other’s recent BMI progress and Fit Credit total. This will allow families to have a friendly competition to exercise and get fit.
Variety, fun and progress tracking; Wii Fit has it all. So, Wii owners if you ready to reclaim your balance and get fit all you need is Wii Fit, a few minutes a day to play and the urge to have fun. Get on board today.
Product Description
The hit combination of Wii Sports and the Wii Remote brought golf swings and tennis serves into people's homes. Now Nintendo turns the living room into a fitness center for the whole family with Wii Fit and the Wii Balance Board. Family members will have fun getting a "core" workout, and talking about and comparing their results and progress on a new channel on the Wii Menu. Lean to block soccer balls, swivel hips to power hoop twirls or balance to hold the perfect yoga pose. As users stand on the Wii Balance Board, included with Wii Fit, their body's overall balance is tied to the game in a way they've never experienced before. Wii Fit also uses the Wii Balance Board for daily tests. These evaluate two key measures that a household can track via progress charts: thanks
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sonu panwar
Newbie
Group: Members
Posts: 5
Joined: Feb 19, 2010
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LONDON, 14 July – Once upon a time, most electric vehicles were milk floats or golf carts and the future was a coffin called the Sinclair C5. It all looked so much brighter 100 years ago.
Back at the dawn of motoring, before cheap oil from Texas and Henry Ford’s production lines, half the cars in America were electric. There was no need to wrestle with hand cranks or gear sticks and nowhere much to drive except round town. By the turn of the 20th century, New York taxis were powered by batteries, which weighed in at more than half a tonne and had to be swapped using hydraulic lifts. Then along came automatic starters, and suburbia and interstate highways. Unfettered by limits on range, and turbo-charged by plummeting prices, internal combustion engines won. Nothing much would change for generations; until now.
Having recently killed the electric car, General Motors could yet become its saviour. Its “new” kind of hybrid, called the Volt, revives an old design by Ferdinand Porsche: a petrol-driven generator that keeps the battery charged for longer trips. For wealthier drivers, the loser of a long-forgotten “battle of the currents” is reincarnate in a roadster that burns off Ferraris. Named after the marginalised genius Nikola Tesla, and powered by a polyphase induction motor that Tesla pioneered, this Lotus knockoff packed with laptop batteries redefines what electric cars can do, travelling 200-plus miles on a single charge. But a price tag just shy of six figures means it won’t change the mass market yet. Absent cheaper, lighter and more powerful battery packs, the only affordable options have been bug-like, low-range and slower than buses, though they’re nippy enough to whirr past cyclists at the lights.
The next few years could change everything, however. Britain’s prime minister says he wants to see the back of pure-petroleum models by 2020, with government incentives to support a switchover. The newest of the pure electric models are getting faster and going further, with 100 mile ranges on the horizon, at less outlandish prices. While some expect battery capacity to double in the coming decade, the weight of cells could also halve, making high-end performance more affordable. The soaring price of oil is focusing minds, both on its scarcity and environmental impact, and above all on the cost of filling a tank. After decades of dependence on this concentrated and user-friendly fuel, Europe’s biggest carmakers now say the future is electric, and their Japanese counterparts agree, as increasingly do die-hards in Detroit. Like GM, the highest profile convert in America, they’re mostly planning hybrids that can plug into the regular mains, but still hold range-extending tanks of liquid fuel.
For now, that’s the variant that drivers seem likeliest to buy, apart from those who run multiple vehicles. Who would trade in the family saloon for a two-seater smaller than a Smart, but which still costs more than a regular hatchback, let alone a £130,000 sports car, like the soon-to-be-produced electric Lightning, or its marginally cheaper Tesla rival? Even plug-ins like the Volt, which GM plans to unveil at its centenary in September, are being touted at over $40,000, which would probably mean making them at a loss. To some, they’re the worst of all worlds: substandard electric cars that still burn fossil fuels. To others, they’re a step in the right direction, cutting emissions and running costs, and developing the infrastructure needed for wholesale electrification, from charging points and (ideally renewable) power sources to subsidies and financing models that offset the higher up-front prices for battery vehicles.
Though less encumbered these days by the “burden of history”, to cite the title of an academic survey of Big Oil and big automakers and their coinciding interest, the “better battery bugaboo” still stalks the industry. Whatever the reality, success is always perceived to be “just around the corner”, says the author of this study, David Kirsch, and claims of breakthroughs should be scrutinised sceptically. That said, radical changes seem to have started, in the minds of consumers as much as elsewhere. Their readiness to go electric, even with the existing limitations, is harder than ever to predict, as is the staying power of hybrids in the longer term. It’s also far from clear who’ll profit. Investment is pouring into drive-train and battery development, but many carmakers feel hamstrung by lack of funds. There are also potential bottlenecks in supplies of parts and raw materials, were production to ramp up significantly. Now that the big manufacturers are getting serious about plug-in hybrids, and the pure electric future they seem to presage, can startups realistically compete?
“That’s the $64,000 question,” says Martin Eberhard, who founded Tesla Motors, but was forced out in a bust-up with its principal backer, the Silicon Valley financier Elon Musk. “The public’s position on cars is right now in flux, and it will be in flux for the next five or ten years,” Eberhard says. “Five years ago the guy who drove a Prius was a weirdo; today that’s very mainstream and the guy who has the SUV is wondering how the hell he’s going to unload it.” None of this guarantees a rosy future for anyone, however. Forget the forecasts of bankruptcy at General Motors, which is offloading Hummers and anything else it can flog. The same fate could befall the industry’s new darlings, or up and coming wannabes, like the Norwegian-based Th!nk, which started life as an offshoot of Ford and now boasts a Porsche-designed prototype called an Ox. “Th!nk is, of course, like Tesla, a fledgling company and the viability of both is certainly questionable,” Eberhard warns. “There’s lots of opportunities to screw up, and I’ve seen both companies screw up a few times already.”
I AM THE RESURRECTION
Tesla’s mission from the outset was to sidestep the traps of recent history. Almost every new venture since the 70s had tried, according to Eberhard, to achieve too much. They tended to be run by idealists who wanted to make cars that met everyone’s needs, but wound up satisfying no one. Tesla’s objective was different, says Glyn Owen, the company’s general manager and a long-time employee of Lotus, whose factory and expertise are vital Tesla components. “This car is partly a marketing tool,” he says, during a tour of the production line, where squat Tesla Roadsters are built alongside the Lotus Elises from which their chassis derives. “It’s proof of a concept and a way of generating interest,” Owen says. “But to really make a difference, we have to scale up drastically.” For that, he concedes, the company needs a partner. It’s already putting out feelers, trading battery expertise with Daimler, and Eberhard talks about Tata as a possible predator. For now, production languishes in single figures, after problems with carbon-fibre, a doomed two-gear transmission and modifications to fit a bigger motor, along with other tweaks like a lowered doorsill to accommodate Elon Musk’s wife.
Nevertheless, the impact has already been huge, both in the media and on “Maximum Bob” Lutz, a cigar-chomping former fighter pilot, who was hired at the start of the decade to revive the fortunes of General Motors. “When Tesla announced they were building a car,” Lutz says, “that kind of tore it for me. I thought, ‘If some little West Coast outfit can do this, we can no longer stand by.’” The Volt concept that GM paraded at last year’s Detroit motor show was a revelation: this year there were dozens like it, and companies from Volkswagen to Mercedes are all talking about launching plug-ins in 2010, when GM’s Volt is due to debut. “Some people said it was a fake, a PR exercise,” Lutz reflects. “We said: ‘We’ll show ‘em’.”
Sceptics had good grounds to be suspicious. Three years earlier, GM crushed an entire fleet of electric cars in the Arizona desert, ignoring pleas from drivers to let them buy them. “What we really need,” fumed a Business Week reader last month, in response to a gushing feature about GM’s plans, “are small electric vehicles that can go 50 to 60 miles on an overnight charge.” For a handful of years, however, that’s exactly what GM manufactured. Its legendary EV1s might have looked like Ford Capris with the back end of an old-school Citroen. But by the time that GM scrapped them, their nickel-metal hydride batteries were capable of triple-digit mileage. The car, based on a prototype called the Impact, was descended from a model that GM built to win a solar-powered race across Australia. Before entering production, a modified EV1 set a land speed record for electric cars, notching up 183 miles per hour. The company leased out hundreds of vehicles between 1996 and the end of its testing programme in 2003. “I’m saving America,” by driving one, Tom Hanks shouted on late-night TV. Mel Gibson likened the EV1 to a Batmobile whooshing out of the Batcave, but that wasn’t enough to keep it alive. There weren’t enough buyers to make it viable, GM claimed, and no amount of pressure could convince the company otherwise, not even all the people on its waiting list.
Bosses had blown a billion dollars on “proving” electric vehicles (EVs) couldn’t work, largely to fob off Californian regulators, who seemed all too happy to collude. In 2003, they in turn scrapped the mandate forcing carmakers to roll out electric models. Instead, the Air Resources Board chose to side with advocates of hydrogen fuel cells, which are widely derided as “the technology of the future… and always will be.” As if to prove that point, car company lobbyists have just watered down the watered down rules: there’s now no requirement to put fixed numbers of fuel-cell vehicles on the roads, which according to Martin Eberhard was the only reason Honda started leasing its FCX Clarity this summer.
Whatever GM’s reasons for not wanting the EV1 to succeed (and critics say much of it comes down to turkeys not voting for Christmas, whether that’s lost trade in parts, servicing and dealership, or cannibalising profitable gas-guzzlers), one look at its adverts is enough to see why it didn’t seduce car-buffs. It did nothing to refute Jay Leno’s view that most “electric cars were driven by people with earth shoes.” You could barely make out a vehicle in the EV1 print ads, let alone someone desirable draped over it, or driving it, or generally in its vicinity. Instead there were abstract layouts and taglines about the future having arrived, but no answers to the obvious questions like “how far, how fast and how much,” laments Chelsea Sexton, who worked on the EV1, then got fired when it was ditched. “Even with the anaemic marketing we had,” Sexton says, it wasn’t destined to fail. “They just had to build us more cars.” It was an ironic flashback to an earlier generation, when the Tennessee Valley Authority tried promoting electric cars in response to the 1970s oil shocks. At one point someone planned a race between Paul Newman and Robert Redford. “I realised we’d get a lot of national publicity,” says David Freeman, an adviser to the Carter administration, “but there weren’t any cars in the showrooms.” This time that wasn’t because they didn’t exist.
“GM realizes they made a serious miscalculation when they killed the EV1,” says Bill Moore, the editor of EVWorld and also an industry consultant. “The only real question is whether the Volt is too little, too late.” GM insists it isn’t, although sales goals are fairly modest: just 60,000 by 2012. Lutz is still adamant times have changed. “Within a few years we hope to be producing hundreds of thousands,” he says, calling the Volt’s plug-in concept “the reinvention of the automobile”. Even so, it’s still not top of his list of priorities: the ultimate goal is to go fully electric. Chelsea Sexton’s glad to hear it, though she’s a vocal supporter of the Volt, despite being “the last person you’d expect to be praising GM, but they are the most aggressive right now about actually doing and not just talking.” Nevertheless, if you gave her millions of dollars to spend tomorrow, she says, “I would probably invest it in batteries.”
I GOT THE POWER
Jay Leno’s voluminous garage suggests why. “I have a 1909 Baker Electric,” boasts the coiffed comedian, who’s as renowned for his car collection as his Woganesque humour. “That goes 110 miles on a single charge.” What’s more, it still works. “I have never done any maintenance,” he insists, “other than maybe greasing the wheel hubs.” To consumers reared on built-in obsolescence, to say nothing of the business plans depending on it, this can come as a shock. “You don’t do anything,” Leno repeats. “You plug it in, charge it and drive it. The motor is virtually maintenance-free.” Apart from the Tesla, which makes similar boast about servicing, there are few cars in production or in the pipeline that can match the Baker’s mileage, even if they could run it off the road. The Th!nk City, for example, due like half a dozen other mini EVs to hit U.S. tarmac by 2010, claims to get 124 miles per charge, though it would be less if you drove flat out at 60 mph.
Not much had changed in battery technology when the EV1 was launched. Its lead acid cells used 100-year-old science and although fairly effective they were heavy and far from ideal. The nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH) replacements weren’t particularly light either, but performance improved quite a bit and some Japanese cars still use something similar. Switching to lithium cells helped shrink mobile phones and the same principle delivers cars more power from less weight, although the Tesla Roadster’s half-tonne bulk in the boot does have the advantage of generating more downforce, which comes in handy when navigating tight corners. The obstacle for many years was lithium’s reactivity, which is why it can store so much energy. It’s enough to “incinerate anybody in the car,” warns Barrie Lawson of Axeon, a Dundee-based battery maker that’s joined up with Allied Vehicles to launch electric taxis in London. “That’s always been the great fear.”
In the case of the Tesla, which has passed U.S. crash tests, there are 6,831 little cells to worry about, lined up in 11 separate sheets and grounded in a gloopy substance to keep them apart. Even if one blows it won’t affect the others, the company says, so there’s nothing to worry about when driving. Even if you crash, and a battery’s broken up, an open circuit cuts its current instantly, says Barrie Lawson. Still, a spate of spontaneous laptop combustion spread panic among carmakers. Manufacturing safety checks have been tightened, and Toyota postponed plans to introduce new battery chemistry for the Prius. Lawson cautions against reading too much into this, stressing that the danger from electric parts dislodged in an accident would be “no worse than spilling a tank of petrol.” Moreover, he says, “if someone came along today and proposed that you carry this highly inflammable stuff around just with a tank with a thin steel wall around it, they would say you were crazy.”
Martin Eberhard concurs. “To me it’s actually quite amazing that you can take a relatively small car, smack it into a truck at you know, 50 or 75 miles an hour and the gasoline tank doesn’t just explode all over the place every time.” Thankfully the same seems to be true for the Tesla, although rival carmakers still make scoffing noises about the number of volatile batteries joined together. In one sense they sort of have a point: the greater the number of cells, the harder it is to ensure that they hold a full charge without them automatically defaulting to the storage capacity of the weakest in the series, which weakens further every time you load it to below maximum. “We’ve got 72 cells in our battery pack,” says Greg Starns, the head of software development at Frazer-Nash Research, another firm which plans to launch electric taxis in London this year. “And we’re doing everything we can to make that fewer.”
The problem is called equalisation and the solution a battery management system, or interface, which every EV needs to run effectively. The Tesla’s was “a huge challenge”, says Owen, though he claims it’s no longer a concern – the car will load up from its wall-mounted three-phase charger in just three or four hours. Sceptics crunching these numbers say that it might take more than five times longer, at best, using a regular plug socket, but Tesla says an overnight charge is still doable. Nevertheless, this battery set up alone costs between $20-30,000, which is what American consumers are used to paying for a mid-range SUV. Put it in a heavier car, like Tesla’s new Model S sedan (which may turn out to be a four-door hatchback if rumours are true), and performance would suffer. Even that vehicle, due in 2010, is expected to sell for somewhere above $60,000. A mass-market model at half that price is still just the stuff of Tesla fantasy, although it’s talked about as next on the to do list.
“It all comes back to the battery,” says Bill Reinert, of Toyota’s U.S. Advanced Technology Group. “If you want to run longer and further on electric power alone, it means a bigger battery, it means charging a battery more fully and discharging it more completely. And it means provisions for cooling or ventilation in order to give the batteries longer life.” That means choosing what you want and what you’re willing to give up, in terms of space, weight and convenience as well as price. Glyn Owen expects batteries to go like microchips, though his EV version of Moore’s law is a more conservative 10-year forecast of doubled power and halved size. “There’s room for at least another doubling of capacity,” agrees Martin Eberhard, who still holds a chunk of Tesla stock, if not management responsibility for talking up the company’s prospects. Barrie Lawson isn’t convinced. “There’s nothing going to come along and make the battery half the size in the near future,” he says. “There’s no huge breakthroughs on the horizon that will make a big impact on the chemistry but there are many variations on the chemistry to optimise the battery performance.”
It’s a question of “flavours of lithium”, to use Lawson’s favoured phrase. Crudely simplified, batteries use lithium in its ionic form (which means stripping the atoms of an electron to make them positive). When the cell’s fully charged, these ions congregate around its anode, which is usually made of graphite. During use, ions migrate within the battery to the other electrode, the cathode, and negatively charged electrons pass between the two via an external circuit that drives the motor. Electrodes are where it gets interesting.
Early cathodes were made of expensive, and scarce, cobalt oxide. Manganese oxide is getting popular now, but more attention has been focused on iron phosphate, which has less of a tendency to overheat. Making lithium cobalt (shorthand for nickel cobalt aluminium cathodes) safer cut its range by 30 percent, Lawson says, so it’s all a question of balancing different priorities. Switching from carbon anodes to lithium titanate allows for faster charging at lower temperatures but available voltage drops by a third or more. Lithium iron phosphate cathodes don’t offer the same speedy charging benefits but they do allow for usage across a wider range of charge; between 10 and 100 percent of capacity, as opposed to between 30 and 70 in most batteries, to minimise the danger of side-effects. Lithium iron phosphate comes cheap and although its performance isn’t as good at lower temperatures, and isn’t always so easy to monitor, it’s the option of choice for many plug-in hybrids, including the Volt.
After five years of mugging up on batteries for Tesla, Martin Eberhard isn’t convinced. “I’m actually fairly pessimistic about lithium iron phosphate,” he says, although he expects it to be a short-lived hit. “They’re already approaching the theoretical limit of the electro-chemistry.” Lithium manganese has more potential, he argues, when you start tinkering with its crystal structure, and the surface area on which ions gather, increasing potential capacity. The key to this is nanotechnology, which can also help speed up charging times. Altairnano, whose batteries are used in the Lightning, claims it’s working towards a 10-minute charge time, from 480-volt outlets that could be placed in a roadside service station. Other researchers say it can be done even quicker, but there’s a risk of overheating. Gerbrand Ceder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology runs a project to find new combinations of materials that can address this problem. His team has modified a lithium iron phosphate battery to make it a quarter the average weight, and way faster to charge. “We can take all the power in or out of our battery in 10 seconds,” Ceder says. “You put that in a Prius and it accelerates like a Ferrari.”
That’s all still stuck in the lab, though perhaps not for long. What’s already in productive use is extended longevity. A123 Systems pioneered this with a battery that, as Eberhard puts it, “although lower charged, went much, much more cycles, and the rate of loss of capacity with each charge cycle was fairly low. But today, if you look at Sony’s iron phosphate, and some of the others like Sanyo, they’re already a better battery than the A123.” This is the source of his projection for manganese. “If you could take a lithium manganese cell,” he says, “and without increasing its capacity at all, just simply increase its cycle life by a factor of two, you’d have made a phenomenally good battery.” One way or another, he thinks it’s inevitable. “Capacity of batteries for the same volume and the same mass has increased historically 8 percent per year; that’s been true for 25 years now,” he says. Cost per cell has dropped in the same time frame by around five percent a year, though it’s stabilised since 2006 because of surging demand. “I’m optimistic that, over time, the batteries will get cheaper, and will get higher capacity in the same volume,” Eberhard concludes. “The venture community here in this country has been investing like crazy in battery technologies.”
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Toyota parts
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| Posted Feb 19, 2010, 8:41 am |
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