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A new study by Wichita State University shows that people who use flowery fonts in their e-mail are less likely to be taken seriously by readers. Choose the wrong font and you risk being seen as less professional, stable and practical, and more rebellious and youthful.

Researchers gauged reader reaction to a business e-mail message displayed in three fonts: Calibri, a "clear-type" font available in Windows Vista and Office 2007; Comic Sans, which is sort of between serious and goofy; and Gigi, a font that looks a lot like cursive handwriting.

Dawn Shaikh, a graduate research assistant at Wichita State University, says reaction to Calibri and Comic Sans was similar. But readers didn't think too highly of the message written in Gigi.

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In late December, a strong earthquake off Taiwan severely damaged fiber optic cables that carry voice and Internet traffic to and between Taiwan, Singapore, India and other Asian countries.

The quake snapped seven of 8 major cables in the Luzon strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. The damaged cables meant no Internet access for millions, and some people are still offline today. Many American businesses found it difficult to impossible to communicate with Asian partners.

Repair crews remain busy lifting the cables off the ocean floor and fixing them.

A month after the catastrophic Internet failure, what have we learned about the fragility of the global communications infrastructure?

Eric Schoonover, senior analyst with research firm TeleGeography, says traffic that once traveled on the damaged cables has been re-routed.

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Earlier this month a jury in Connecticut convicted teacher Julie Amero on four counts of risking injury to a minor after an incident in 2004 in which pornographic images popped up on her classroom PC. Several students at the middle school saw the pop-up porn.

Prosecutors argued Amero actively visted porn sites in the classroom. The case has become something of a cause celebre among critics who say Amero is an innocent victim of a poorly-secured computer hopelessly infected with programs that served up ads for porn sites.

W. Herbert Horner, a computer consultant who examined the computer and testified on behalf of Amero, says the judge did not let him present all of his evidence.

Computer security firm Sunbelt Software, which makes anti-spyware programs, has come to Amero's defense. CEO Alex Eckelberry says the evidence shows that students visited some Web sites that deposited the spyware and adware on Amero's computer.

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Windows Vista, which goes on sale next week, is getting all the attention, but a different operating system is just around the corner

Apple is set to drop OSX Leopard on the computing public come Spring.

Guest: Apple expert Leander Kahney

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CNET's Brian Cooley has three reasons you should consider upgrading to Windows Vista, and three reasons you might want to stick with Windows XP.

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On Stolen ID Search, users enter their Social Security and credit card numbers to see if their information has already been stolen. The site compares the numbers to known sources of stolen data.

Sounds like a bad idea to reveal your personal data to some Web site, right? The site's operator swears it's not only safe, but smart.

StolenIDSearch is run by Trusted ID, a Silicon Valley company that sells services to help people prevent identity theft.

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When a record store called Other Music hit the scene 11 years ago in New York's East Village, it chose as its location a little spot across the street from then-powerhouse Tower Records. The Tower chain of stores is gone, a victim of the downturn in the music industry. Now, Other Music plans to open a digital music store where it will sell songs in the MP3 format, without copy restrictions.

Other Music co-owner Josh Madell says iTunes dominates the digital music space, but there's room for other players.

Other Music's digital songs will sell for 10 to 15 percent more than iTunes, according to Madell.

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Microsoft Office 2007, the first major update to the office software suite in several years, is a "terrific" upgrade, according to St. Paul Pioneer Press technology columnist Julio Ojeda-Zapata. He says, however, that most average consumers probably don't need it.

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Ever since major record labels started selling downloadable music, they've built restrictions into the songs. This is called, perhaps euphemistically, digital rights management, or DRM. These restrictions prevent customers from making backup copies or playing them on different devices. A song from Apple's iTunes, for example, won't play on any portable device but an Apple iPod.

Digital music journalist and blogger Eliot Van Buskirk sees signs record labels are beginning to see the downside of customer-unfriendly DRM, and may soon begin selling more music in the unprotected MP3 format.

Van Buskirk, who writes for Wired News, says Amazon.com's expected entry into MP3 music is one sign of the changes to come.

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A new report from the Pew Internet Project says Americans are turning to the Internet in growing numbers for political news and information.

Fifteen percent of those surveyed said they relied on the Web for the bulk of their political news in 2006, up from 7 percent in the 2002 congressional election cycle.

The Internet still lags behind the top three sources of news: television, newspapers, and radio. But TV and magazines are losing ground, while radio is holding steady.

Pew Internet Director Lee Rainie says the growth of high-speed Internet is contributing to the Internet's growing influence in politics. Rainie says with e-mail, blogs, and social networking, the Internet is making politics more of an active conversation.

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eMusic, the number two digital download service behind Apple's iTunes, recently sold it's 100 millionth song.

eMusic sells songs from smaller labels and independent artists, and unlike iTunes, Napster and Rhapsody, the songs are MP3 files with no copy restrictions. You can play them anywhere and make as many copies as you like.

eMusic President and CEO David Pakman says the lack of "digital rights management" is a big reason for eMusic's success.

Here's a longer version (MP3) of the interview.

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The loser of the Florida 13th District congressional race, Democrat Christine Jennings, and 11 voters from Sarasota, are contesting the November election. They claim voting machines failed to count thousands of votes. Jennings lost by fewer than 400 votes.

Jennings and the 11 voters are asking to investigate the machines, made by Election Systems & Software, and the software that operates them, known as "source code." They're appealing the decision by a federal judge who denied the source code request.

Guests: Matt Zimmerman, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Ken Fields, ES&S

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A university professor says schools should use video games to prepare children for the work force.

David Williamson Shaffer, an education science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says video games help children master technology, an essential skill for successful careers.

Shaffer, author of the book How Computer Games Help Children Learn, says video games might help the United States compete against India and China, which are turning out engineers and scientists at a faster rate.

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More than 100 universities worldwide are making class lectures available for free in the form of audio and video podcasts. The so-called OpenCourseWare movement started in 2002 at MIT, and is spreading rapidly now that podcasting is going mainstream. Podcasting is taking the movement in new directions.

The University of California Berkeley has 59 complete courses available on iTunes, which is the most popular place to subscribe to podcasts. Those courses include Existentialism in Literature and Film, and Introduction to Chemistry. Berkeley offers videos on Google Video as well.

Dan Colman, director of Stanford University's continuing studies program and creator of the Open Culture weblog, says college and university podcasts generally fall into two categories: guest lectures and complete course lectures. He says higher education podcasts are just now beginning to take off.

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Howard Dean's presidential campaign was perhaps the first to tap the power of the Internet to organize and raise money.

Phil Noble of consulting firm Politics Online says the 2008 presidential election cycle will be Dean X 10 - and one candidate is set to harness the 'Net like no other.

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Tomorrow at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, St. Paul-based company CodeWeavers begins selling new software that will let Mac OS users run some Windows programs on their machines.

CrossOver Mac allows some Windows applications to work on newer model Macs. With CrossOver Mac, users could run Microsoft Outlook to get their email, for example, even though Outlook is not a Mac OSX-compatible program.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, technology columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, says at $60, CrossOver Mac is a less-expensive way live in both the Mac and PC worlds. But he says the program has limitations.

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Placeblogger is a new tool for discovering, reading and subscribing to local blogs.

"Placeblogs" are devoted to particular neighborhoods, towns, cities, or regions and typically feature news, discussion, and information on local businesses. They're written by locals for locals.

On Placeblogger, you'll find links to sites like Perfect Duluth Day about Duluth, Minnesota and Hat City Blog from Danbury, Connecticut.

Placeblogger is backed by prominent citizen journalism advocates, including NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen.

Lisa Williams says she started Placeblogger because local blogs are hard to find.

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David Pogue of the New York Times is looking back on the best tech product features of the past year -- not necessarily the best products, because sometimes products fail despite a few good traits.

Pogued liked the fuel gage on Lexar's Mercucury USB flash drive, for example, which lets users know how much room they have left on the data storage device. And the magnetic power cord for Apple laptops caught his fancy.

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Dell, Google, AOL, and Apple were naughty AND nice in 2006, according to Future Tense news analyst Dwight Silverman.

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Video game machines, like Play Station3, XBox, and Wii, are not just for playing games anymore. Increasingly, consumers are using them to download media, watch DVD movies, and browse the Web.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata, who writes about technology for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, says consoles are getting better at doing the Internet thing.