We here at the Law Blog have been called for jury duty several times (in New York City, it feels like an annual event), but have never been picked to sit. It’s probably a good thing, because, despite our legal training and basic understanding of how trials work, we’d find it excruciating to not be able to use Google (GOOG) to do our own research on issues that arise in the case.

So we’re a bit sympathetic to those jurors who are mucking up cases all over the country by researching, iPhoning, Blackberrying, Twittering–what have you–during trials despite prohibitions against such activities. Click here for today’s story on the situation, from the NYT’s John Schwartz.

The lead anecdote in Schwartz’s story is particularly evocative: Last week, a juror in a federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet. So the judge questioned the rest of the jury only to find that eight other jurors had been doing the same thing.

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These are, as you may have heard, tough times for newspapers. But they are not the first tough times. In just four years during the mid-1960s, for instance, New York City lost the papers that had come to carry the nameplates of William Randolph Hearst’s American, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Hearst’s Journal, the Mirror, the Sun, the Telegram, Horace Greeley’s Tribune, and Joseph Pulitzer’s World.

The efforts to save these dying institutions, especially the Herald Tribune–then the New York Times’s leading competitor–remain a staple of newspaper nostalgia, and have literally filled books. But what relevance do they have for our own time? No Internet threatened then, no cable television. The ’60s were a time of economic growth.

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There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by “Helvetica,” Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true–or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur?

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If you’re looking for a tech job in the United States, the best place to go is not Silicon Valley. It’s New York. According to a report released Tuesday from AeA, a tech industry trade group, New York and its surrounding metropolitan area lead the nation when it comes to the number of high-tech jobs. Rounding out the top five in order were Washington; San Jose/Silicon Valley; Boston; and Dallas-Fort Worth.

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Like millions of other Americans and many of New York City’s “bridge and tunnel” crowd, I live in the ‘burbs. While I do a great deal of travel for my full-time job, I am also classified as a “mobile” employee, so I’m not formally attached to an office–I’ve been issued a company laptop and they pay my monthly broadband, cellular and phone bills, which are in the form of an AT&T (T) Callvantage VOIP account.

Currently, I’m a cable modem subscriber. I pay approximately $65 per month for Optimum Online’s boost plan, which gives you up to 5Mbps/30Mbps in theoretical upstream and downstream bandwidth. In practice, however, I’ve become accustomed to a number of service interruptions, where my broadband can go down for hours at a time, and days where the local XBOX kiddies and torrenters are clearly over-saturating the network. But I tolerate this because I have very few options for broadband in my immediate area.

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