It was only a matter of time. Most have known for a while now that Bluray players were designed in different phases. The problem is that the same goes for the discs themselves. This leads to a situation where some players play some movies while some players are unable to. Such is the case with the first generation player from Samsung. And now the BD01200 player is the center of a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer Samsung.

A man named Bob McGovern has filed a suit because his BluRay player is unable to play some of the newer Blu-Ray movies.  His Bluray was manufactured in 2006 and is unable to play the movies due to the lack of updated firmware for his particular machine.

Samsung has publicly stated that they have no intentions of providing the necessary firmware update for the machine. Why the company would do this and face a lawsuit is a curious decision indeed. The lawsuit is open to anyone facing the same dilemma as Mr. McGovern.

The lawsuit was lodged in May against Jeppesen Dataplan by several men who say they were taken on secret flights to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Afghanistan and Jordan, where they say they were tortured.

The lawsuit charged that Jeppesen was a leading supplier of logistics to planes used by US intelligence, and that it carried out 70 such flights in 2001.

The government asked the judge, James Ware in San Diego California, to throw out the case without considering it, arguing it involved secrets that could be neither confirmed nor denied.

After receiving a confidential statement from Michael Hayden, the current CIA director, the judge agreed.

"The Court's review of General Hayden's public and classified declarations confirm that proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations and that no protective procedure can salvage this case," his statement said.

"Thus, the Court finds that the issues involved in this case are non-justiciable because the very subject matter of the case is a state secret," he added.

The planes, which flew under the names of CIA front corporations, are suspected of having been part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

Under the program, terror suspects were abducted and then illegally flown to countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan and Romania for interrogation.

The European Union's Court of Justice ruled Thursday that Greece illegally ignored an EU order to recover millions of euros (dollars) in aid it gave to the ailing Olympic national airline.

The Luxembourg-based court said Greece "had not fulfilled its obligations" to take back the handouts from Olympic Airlines SA and its predecessor Olympic Airways.

EU officials said last November that Olympic would have to repay 130 million euros ($189.6 million) to the Greek government.

The ruling confirmed three previous EU court decisions since 2002, which backed the EU's executive Commission's arguments that the millions of euros (dollars) in direct aid and subsidies violated state aid rules and gave Olympic an unfair advantage over competitors.

Greece and Olympic Airlines still have an appeal pending in a lower EU court to annul earlier Commission decisions against restructuring aid and subsidies given to the airline.

Olympic Airlines won a small victory last year at the EU court when it said the Commission failed to prove some of the funds violated EU state aid rules. Those funds involved unpaid taxes on fuel and spare parts, as well as unpaid fees to Athens International Airport.

For years, Greece supplied subsidies to the struggling national airline, which in 2001 had debts totaling some 120 million euros ($166 million). In 2003, the government incorporated the assets of debt-ridden Olympic Airways and two subsidiaries into the newly named Olympic Airlines.

Investors showed immediate enthusiasm for Pittsburgh-based Calgon Carbon Corp., an industry leader in mercury-removal technology. Stocks were up the day of the ruling and continued to rise in the following days.

"We think that long-term it is going to be quite positive for us," said Calgon spokesperson Gail Gerono.

In its Feb. 8 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR).

The court agreed with opponents that the EPA, in adopting the CAMR for the control of mercury, had violated the Clean Air Act.

Mercury is a neurotoxin, a powerful poison that causes nerve and brain damage. It enters waterways and accumulates in fish and is especially harmful to children.

The 2005 CAMR aimed to cap U.S. power plant mercury emissions, which stand at about 48 tons a year. It would have reduced them by about 20 percent by 2010 and 70 percent by 2018.

Environmental groups and 17 states sued the agency, arguing that the Clean Air Act requires cuts as steep as 90 percent because existing mercury-removal technology can achieve those levels.

Last week's court action leaves the nation with no regulatory control over power plant mercury emissions while the EPA establishes a new rule based on available technology.

"It's sort of ironic," said American Electric Power spokesman Pat D. Hemlepp. "The environmentalists' challenge actually eliminates some of the reductions that would have taken place by 2010."

Some reductions will take place even without regulation.

"The majority of the mercury emissions reductions that we would achieve by 2010 will happen even without that rule (as) a co-benefit of other equipment that we are installing for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides control," Hemlepp explained.

But, he added, "We would have had to also put some activated carbon systems in place on some plants to do some mercury capture--and those are the systems that we will likely end up delaying until we get some clarity on what's going to be required."

Activated carbon, the current industry standard for mercury removal, is injected in powdered form into the flue of a coal-fired plant.

"The activated carbon comes into contact with the mercury and (bonds to it by chemical attraction)," Calgon's Gerono explained. "The activated carbon that holds the mercury is taken to a landfill."

The technology can remove 90 percent of the mercury from the flue stream, she said.

In a statement, Boston Scientific said it believed the jury's verdict is unsupported by both the evidence and the law. As a result, the company said it would seek to overturn the verdict in post-trial motions and, if unsuccessful, appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals.

"We do not intend to record a charge at this time because we believe we will prevail on appeal," said company spokesman Paul Donovan.

Barbara Wrigley, a patent attorney with Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly in Minneapolis who was not involved with the case, said the jury award easily stands as one of the 10 largest ever in the U.S. An appeal likely would take about two years, Wrigley estimated, and the matter could drag on even longer if the case is then sent back to the lower court for reconsideration.

"It's not unusual for an individual inventor to win an award like this," Wrigley said, adding a jury's perception is of a David-like underdog going up against a Goliath-like
corporation.

Stents are metal mesh tubes used to prop open heart arteries, and the Taxus stent has generated billions in sales for Boston Scientific's stent division in Maple Grove. The stent is coated with drugs that prevent arteries from re-clogging - a development that helped make stents blockbuster products in 2003 and 2004.

Gary Hoffman, an attorney who represented Saffran, said his client came up with the essential concept behind drug coated-stents while completing his residency at a hospital in Boston. Saffran worked at home with makeshift materials in coming up with the idea for placing a layer of material on devices that could "directionally deliver a drug to damaged tissue," Hoffman said.

Saffran applied for a patent in 1995 and received it two years later, said Hoffman, who is with Dickstein Shapiro in Washington, D.C. It is valid, he said, until 2013. The inventor also has a lawsuit against New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson, which has dominated the drug-coated stent market along with Boston Scientific.

"Dr. Saffran is an independent inventor, and his contributions to the advancement of medical technology needed to be recognized and rewarded," Hoffman said.

Saffran still is considering whether to seek an injunction against the sale of the Taxus products, Hoffman said.

Johnson & Johnson won such an injunction last year in a separate patent case involving a Medtronic spinal product, which Fridley-based Medtronic had to remove from the market.

To Larry Kurland, a partner in the intellectual property group with the St. Louis-based law firm Bryan Cave, said the award speaks volumes about the attitude of juries in the eastern district of Texas like the one that heard the case. That district, lawyers say, has a reputation for being plaintiff-friendly.

"They tend to believe if you've got a patent ... you must have done something that makes you entitled to something," Kurland said.