The new Xbox 360 will perform as an IPTV set-top box, which will enable users to download movies and TV shows through Internet network and watch them on TV.

HP will also debut TVs that can access movies, photos and music directly from computers or from the Internet.

"It’s the new CE - not consumer electronics," Jan-Luc Blakborn, HP’s director of digital entertainment, was quoted by AP. "We like to think of it as connected entertainment."

From the mobile industry, Sony Ericsson is unveiling a watch that can receive calls, check e-mails and play music. Nokia is taking a mobile tablet PC a phone that can be used as a credit card.

Korea’s top two electronics firms _ Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics _ are among key players in this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), each occupying more than 2,000 square meters of space in central spots. Smaller firms such as LG.Philips LCD, Daewoo Electronics, Reigncom and Cowon also are taking part in the industry fest, which goes through this Thursday.

Believing that the transition from the high-definition to the full high-definition will be the main theme of the New Year, makers are bringing a wide range of "extreme quality" TVs and video players to the show. But LG is stealing the limelight with the first Blu-ray/HD-DVD dual player.

The industry has been divided into two sides _ Blu-ray team led by Sony and Samsung and HD-DVD group inspired by Toshiba and Microsoft. But LG is trying to break the wall and make the competition meaningless with the introduction of this all-around player, though it will carry a somewhat cumbersome price tag.

The breakthrough invention will be challenged by Warner Bros., which made a similar attempt from a different angle. The media giant is introducing the Total HD Disc that places both formats of movies on a single disk. The price, however, also remains as a key question mark.

Samsung’s showroom will be full of tech-savvy gadgets, and its main focus is large-screen TVs. The company was crowned as the world’s largest TV maker last year with the splendid success of Bordeaux brand, and is unveiling its sequel today. Its 102-inch full-HD TV will certainly be one of the main attractions of the show as well.

Committed to the Blu-ray side, Samsung is unveiling new, and cheaper Blu-ray player, which is expected to be priced at around $500. Another noteworthy products are a double-sided LCD display for mobile phones, a slim MP3 music player that has an external speaker, and a slide-up style mobile phone with a full qwerty keyboard.

Daewoo Electronics, the distant third after Samsung and LG, is taking a lineup of full-HD LCD TVs with a snowflake pattern embroiled on the frame. Sleek Blu-ray players and car

Diederich won't be in Washington tomorrow, but has submitted two briefs on behalf of the Rockland Coalition for Democracy and Freedom, the Rockland County Conservation Association and the Federation of New York Solid Waste Associations.

Christopher St. Lawrence, in his capacity as chairman of the Rockland Solid Waste Management Authority, and the authority's legal counsel, Bridget Gauntlett, will both attend the court session tomorrow.

The Rockland Solid Waste Management Authority has also filed a brief allowing it to weigh in on the case, United Haulers Association Inc., etc., v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority, and Oneida and Herkimer counties.

St. Lawrence, who is also supervisor of the town of Ramapo, said Friday that communities have the right to manage their waste and to require that it be sent to a specific location for transfer or landfill burial.

He said the health and safety of residents and the environment depended on a community's ability to manage its waste, without having a garbage hauler deciding where it would go.

Diederich represented the New York State Association for Solid Waste Management when United Haulers first sued Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority, and Oneida and Herkimer counties, which are located in upstate New York.

United Haulers argued that requiring garbage collectors to bring their trash to a specific location violated the U.S. Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause.

The clause empowers the U.S. Congress "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." The interpretation of the clause has evolved over the years, but it has been used to prevent and break up monopolies.

The haulers argued that the counties and solid waste authority they sued were creating a monopoly in violation of the clause by requiring use of specific disposal facilities.

Diederich successfully argued that waste itself was not an article of commerce, whereas the management of that waste was. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled on the case in 2001.

A similar case then made its way through the Sixth Circuit Court, which is based in Ohio. In that case, National Solid Waste Management Association v. Daviss County, the court ruled last year that so-called "flow control" of trash did violate the Commerce Clause.

The U.S. Supreme Court will now attempt to rectify the differing views of the circuit courts, Diederich said.

He also said local residents should be allowed to democratically choose and decide whether their locally generated trash should go to a publicly managed local facility.

"I view this as a worldwide environmental issue," Diederich said. "If you view waste as valuable, you're encouraging more of it."

Instead, he said, it was the management of that waste that should be valued. That management, he said, should include both reducing waste and recycling what had to be collected.

Retired judge Stan Billingsley pores through news accounts daily to find the law behind the story. He's part of a new and growing medium that hopes to fill a gap in news coverage and encourage discussion of the law: legal blogs.

Last week, after studying case law and interviewing the lawyer for the Executive Branch Ethics Commission, Billingsley concluded on news.lawreader.com that the commission has no legal basis to continue legal proceedings against Dan Druen in light of Gov. Ernie Fletcher's pardon of him in the merit hiring investigation.

He's previously defended Chief Justice Joseph Lambert for writing a controversial footnote to a Supreme Court opinion and blasted a Western Kentucky judge for jailing illegal immigrants.

"We look at the law behind the issues," Billingsley said. "We are certainly not partisan in respect to political philosophy, but we do have the driving concept of, 'If you're going to state the law, state it correctly.'"

At least six Kentucky law blogs, or blawgs, have emerged in the last two years, regularly posting digests of court decisions, analyses of statutes and dissections of legal theories. Others are popping up around the country and internationally.

They provide online the kind of in-depth, regular legal analysis usually available only in limited-access media.

Blawggers say they also are motivated by loftier ambitions of improving their profession. Three Kentucky blawggers who were recently interviewed say that what they do is an extension of what civic-minded lawyers have always done: encourage a scholarly discussion of the law.

But now that debate occurs daily rather than in periodicals and journals.

Blawggers have attempted to distinguish themselves from their partisan political counterparts. Louisville personal-injury lawyer Michael Stevens, who publishes kentuckylawblog.com, recently wrote that he doesn't want to be called a blogger anymore because of the baggage associated with it.

Blogs, short for Web logs, are online diaries or journals that allow readers to respond to and comment on the writer's posts.

Blawgs mostly are geared toward lawyers and not a general audience -- unless, say, you have a strange fascination with the intricacies of divorce law. For that, go to Divorce Law Journal at http:// louisvilledivorce.typepad.com.

Billingsley started his free blog to drive traffic to his commercial Web site, lawreader.com, an online law library. It has a search engine for Kentucky's laws and rules of evidence, synopses of appeals court cases and examples of jury instructions, pleadings and other documents commonly filed by attorneys.

"We get the same comment time after time: 'Now I can compete with the big firms,'" Billingsley said. "A single practitioner cannot afford to maintain a big law library."

The Web site saves lawyers time, not to mention inconvenient trips to Frankfort, he said.

The local blawgs are generally light on political commentary, though they do analyze and digest court decisions. They've also defended judges who they say have been criticized unfairly.

"We are doing this for the love of the profession," said Diana Skaggs, who publishes Divorce Law Journal. "We are all aware of the undermining of the public confidence in the judiciary. We see the need for public confidence in our judiciary, and we have an excellent judiciary."

Billingsley defended Lambert last summer for tucking into an unrelated ruling a footnote that said the governor enjoys absolute immunity and may face prosecution only if impeached first. Billingsley disagreed with the footnote but said it's common for judges to comment on legal matters that are not directly related to the case at hand.

The blawggers frequently analyze the law behind major news stories. Billingsley, for example, posted Kentucky cases involving the Bible in the courtroom after a Mississippi jury consulted a Bible while deliberating whether to give the death penalty to a woman who murdered her husband.

Stevens links to court stories across the state -- appeals, court decisions and other law related news such as forums and local bar events. He says his site fills a void left by state bar publications that publish only monthly or quarterly.

"I enjoy thinking about the law, writing about the law and sharing this information with other lawyers," he said.

Blawgs have generated some controversy among those concerned that they constitute lawyer advertising, which is regulated by state bar associations. Lawyers are required to submit advertisements to the Kentucky Bar Association for review and pay a $50 fee, leading to initial fears that blawggers would have to pay $50 per post.

The bar's advertising commission has ruled that is not necessary, but it does require lawyer bloggers to register their "about" pages, which typically contain biographies and links to law firm Web sites.

Robert L. Elliott, a Lexington lawyer who is on the advertising commission, said law blogs "are kind of a new game in town." He said the bar has not yet developed hard rules for how to handle them.

Law blogs are not necessarily lawyer advertising, depending on their content, he said. But Elliott said some blawgs do appear to be nothing more than advertisements, though he declined to point to specific sites.

Lexington lawyer Benjamin Cowgill, who publishes Legal Ethics Newsletter at legalethics.info, said law blogs have no more ethical issues than lawyer Web sites. Cowgill's site triggered the bar association's review of its advertising regulations.

Cowgill says if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he'd be a blawgger.

"He would be thrilled to live at a time when it is possible to share information with interested people throughout the world, simply by sitting down at his desk and writing at a keyboard," Cowgill wrote in an e-mail.

The US Court of Appeals in Chicago has "elected" to uphold Indiana’s voter ID law, albeit in a split decision.

The law that requires voters to show a photo ID at the polls was challenged as an undue burden on the right to vote.

While the court writes that the law can be improved, the justices ruled that the regulation to show a photo ID was reasonable.

One judge disagreed, writing in dissent, the law was called a thinly veiled attempt to discourage Election Day turnout.

The justice pointed out that voter fraud is already a crime and that no one in Indiana had ever been charged with that crime.

A Washington State research group claims three of the world's largest electronics makers are infringing on Bluetooth technology patents developed at the University of Washington.

In a lawsuit filed last month in the U.S. District Court in Seattle, the Washington Research Foundation (WRF), which licenses and manages patents developed by Washington State universities, claims Japan's Matsushita, Finland's Nokia and South Korea's Samsung are using unlicensed Bluetooth chipsets in their computers, cell phones and headsets.

The wireless Bluetooth technology was developed by Ericsson in the mid-1990s and made available at no cost to other companies to establish a wireless standard. But WRF claims in the lawsuit that University of Washington student Edwin Suominen developed technology for a "simplified high-frequency broadband tuner and tuning method" at the same time.

WRF holds four patents on the technology developed by Suominen. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages but asks the court to issue an injunction to stop Matsushita, Nokia and Samsung from selling their Bluetooth products.

The three companies buy their Bluetooth chipsets from CSR, a British chipmaker not named in the lawsuit. Nevertheless, CSR issued a statement that the lawsuit "is without merit in relation to CSR's Bluetooth chips and CSR will defend its products vigorously."

Nokia said it only recently received the complaint and is still evaluating WRF's claims. "Nokia intends to respond in the very near future," a company spokesman said.

Steven Lisa, the lawyer representing WRF, was unavailable for comment. Matsushita and Samsung did not return calls seeking comment on the lawsuit.

According to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), there are approximately 852 products from 358 different companies that use Bluetooth technology. The group claims more than 9.5 million Bluetooth products are shipping every week.

Bluetooth emerged in 1998 with the formation of the Bluetooth SIG and release of an initial specification the following year. Adoption of the technology was slow at first, but quickly picked up, as more vendors incorporated the low-power, short-range technology into small devices.

In one labor-related case, BCI Coca-Cola Co. of Los Angeles v. EEOC (06-341), the Court will determine whether an employer may be held liable for a subordinate worker's alleged bias where the worker did not make the employment decision at issue. In a second labor-related case, Long Island Care at Home v. Coke (06-593), the Court will decide whether home care workers employed by outside agencies, not directly by families, should receive overtime pay. In other cases, the Court will examine federal law liability for lost or damaged freight, whether private prep schools can talk to prospective student athletes despite their voluntary agreement to obey a no-recruiting rule, and whether courts may consider inferences of innocence when deciding whether someone sued for federal securities violations has a guilty state of mind.

North Carolina's oldest law firm, Raleigh-based Maupin Taylor, announced Friday that it plans to merge with a Richmond, Va., firm, Williams Mullen.

The combined company would be one of the largest in the Southeast with 300 lawyers, 700 employees and about a dozen offices in North Carolina; Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and London.

The name of the combined firm will be Williams Mullen, although North Carolina offices will operate under the name Williams Mullen Maupin Taylor for a transitional period. The firm's headquarters will be in Richmond.

"This will be good for North Carolina because it adds more depth in service that we can provide here," said Keith Kapp, Maupin Taylor's managing partner.

Although Raleigh will lose the cachet of having the firm's headquarters, Kapp said there will be no layoffs, closed offices or cutbacks as a result of the merger.

Maupin Taylor has about 130 employees and 30 partners, all of whom will become partners in Williams Mullen. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"This is a combination of two firms where nobody is buying or selling anything," Kapp said.

Maupin Taylor will gain Williams Mullen's Washington strategies group, which will be useful for clients with ties to federal government agencies, Kapp said. Williams Mullen gets a significant North Carolina client base.

In environmental law, Williams Mullen complements Maupin Taylor's strength in water quality issues with an expertise in air quality.

Joey Smith, chairman and CEO of Williams Mullen, Virginia's third-largest law firm, will become chairman and CEO of the merged company.

Such unions are common among law, accounting and medical practices, said Bill Wagner, an investment banker in Raleigh who helps execute mergers. "It comes down to being able to provide a fuller range of services as a combined firm rather than have to send business away," Wagner said.

Maupin Taylor has offices in Raleigh, Research Triangle Park and Wilmington. Williams Mullen has offices in Charlottesville, McLean, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond, Tysons Corner, Virginia Beach and Portsmouth, Va.; Washington, D.C.; and London.

Maupin Taylor's Raleigh office will be the second-largest in the combined firm, with about 100 employees. The merger is expected to close March 1.

Maupin Taylor has had several names since its founding in 1870.

It was known as Maupin Taylor Ellis from the 1960s until 2003. That was when Thomas F. Ellis, a well-known supporter of former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms and the Republican Party, left the firm.

Ellis earned some fame for helping elect various high-level Republicans. He was credited with salvaging Ronald Reagan's political career by helping him win the 1976 presidential primary in North Carolina.

Today, Maupin Taylor concentrates on corporate law, litigation, and employment and labor law.

http://www.maupintaylor.com