Priscilla Wood is a model and actress that I know. She is a total liar, someone who can not be trusted. Her legal name is Rebecca Smith-Spiker.

The Joanna Fueyo website is now officially launched. At that site, you can see the court pleadings that allege she is mentally ill and that she committed employment fraud against IBM. She now works for the University of Rhode Island, I wonder if they know about these allegations!

Back Bay Citizen has launched a new blog. There is a list of people he has met at:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/backbaycitizen/people-i-have-met

He mentions Joanna Fueyo, Rebecca Smith-Spiker, Priscilla Wood and Michael Elkaim.

This is an interesting site about Rebecca Smith-Spiker. She is also known as Priscilla Anne Wood. I can personally attest that she is a total liar, someone who uses people, who has no concern for anyone other than herself. She is a total nightmare to deal with. Avoid her at all costs. See the site for more information.

Up until a few weeks ago, Mike Gillin was a tough man to get a hold of.

His basement apartment in Smithtown, N.Y. is a virtual black hole for cellular signals. AT&T Inc.’s cellular service is just good enough that Mr. Gillin’s iPhone would ring when dialed—but the calls would usually fail to connect. Text messages would arrive hours, or even days, late. Friends trying to reach him would have to switch back and forth between dialing his land line and his cellphone in an effort to get through.

“It was always a process of calling one number, and then the other and hoping I answered one,” says Mr. Gillin, 35-year-old email systems manager. “It was always a pain.”

Roger Cheng tell us about a textbook-size cellphone gadget known as a femtocell that helps with unreliable cellular service. So why aren’t major cellular carriers promoting the device?

So it’s no wonder that in May Mr. Gillin jumped at the chance to buy AT&T’s 3G Microcell—a textbook-size cellphone gadget known as a femtocell that helps with unreliable cellular service. Think of it as a personal cellphone tower. It operates on the same technological principle, receiving an incoming call signal via the home’s DSL or cable Internet connection, and then broadcasting the signal to the user’s cellphone.

Never heard of a femtocell? Many other cellphone users haven’t, either.
Continue Reading: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703636404575353153350315146.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

Fixing the hiccups of a home computer is an annoyance—lugging it to a store is time consuming and following directions over the phone can get frustrating. But a host of repair services say they solve computer woes by connecting virtually to your machine.

Technicians use an Internet connection to check your computer remotely—you simply have to give up control of your mouse for a few hours. The services claim to get rid of annoying error messages or viruses, increase computer speed or deal with other software problems. There are many such offerings on the Internet and quality is difficult to discern.

The companies can’t fix physical issues like a cracked screen or a malfunctioning keyboard. And because they connect virtually, a reliable Internet connection is always necessary for the service.

We picked four such services to test on well-used, finicky laptops. While some full-service companies may also provide remote help, we focused on companies that provide virtual assistance exclusively. For each request, we cited specific problems. Privacy was an initial concern, but we could see the mouse maneuvering through our files and all actions were transparent. The offerings cost between $19.95 and $125 for a one-time service—similar to the cost of taking a computer to a shop. Some companies offered to do up to three hours of work while others say they work as long as it takes; our longest session was four hours.

How did they do? Continue reading: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703954804575381240099315372.html

When Acquia Inc. launches its new service today, the goal will be . . . simple.

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The service, called Drupal Gardens, is designed to make the creation of complex websites easier than it has ever been before. And the Woburn company — which sells products and services for Drupal, a website creation software platform that is popular with developers — hopes to achieve that goal via “ridiculous simplicity,’’ according to Jeff Noyes, the head of user experience for the firm.

Noyes’s job title, in case there’s any doubt about the company’s priority, is “director of simplicity.’’

Although online sites continue to proliferate — some estimates peg the current number at 3 billion — creating Web pages is still regarded as difficult and intimidating for many. Acquia is hoping to change that.

“We want to close the ease-of-use gap,’’ said Acquia chief executive Thomas Erickson.

The new service is designed to reduce the time it takes to create a working website, cutting the usual process from three to six months to “60 minutes or less, and that will change everything,’’ Erickson said.

The payoff for Acquia could be a bigger share of business from the thousands of websites that are being created every day, from complex corporate sites to Web bulletin boards for church groups and neighborhood events.

WordPress, a competitor based in Redwood City, Calif., is the leading platform for users and developers who want an easy way to get content on the Web.

Acquia is hoping that its new software will close the gap between the two platforms.

The Drupal Gardens project has been in development for more than a year, and is a crucial one for the company, which was founded in December 2007 and has 65 employees.

Drupal is an open source Web content management system, meaning it is built and maintained by a fast-growing, worldwide army of volunteer programmers, and is available for anybody to use at no cost. Acquia was cofounded by the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, to sell enhanced services and support for the open source project.

The company has 475 customers who pay annual subscriptions ranging from $349 to $8,000 for Acquia’s support and access to services.

Drupal’s profile has continued to rise as it has been used to power high-profile websites for Sony Music, NASA, Nike, Warner Bros., the humor publisher The Onion, Fast Company magazine, and Harvard University. Last year, the Obama administration relaunched the White House website using Drupal software. More than 500,000 websites are now registered with drupal.org, its community hub.

But as Drupal has gained credibility as a platform for large, complex sites, it has yet to win over less-sophisticated bloggers or novice website creators.

Continue Reading: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/07/22/acquia_aims_to_make_it_easier_to_design_websites/

Sometime next week, President Obama will finally sign a financial reform bill. Plenty of banks will have to deal with messy new rules, but one big winner in the “spare me from further regulation” sweepstakes was auto dealers.

About 80 percent of buyers apply for loans at auto dealers, who were exempted from the finance bill. Consumer and military organizations wanted auto dealers covered in the financial overhaul bill.

Mr. Obama wanted the new consumer financial protection agency to oversee dealers and the loans they arrange for consumers. So did many consumer groups and military organizations, because crooked dealers have taken advantage of many young soldiers.

But the dealers prevailed, winning exemption from oversight by the new agency, in part through the efforts of Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas. Mr. Brownback said in a May statement on his Web site that “auto dealers are a part of Main Street, not Wall Street.” That makes sense as long as you ignore that Wall Street firms bundle into bonds many of the loans that dealers help originate and conveniently forget that lots of dealers are actually owned by publicly traded companies.

Mr. Brownback also noted that “more than 90 percent of auto loans are financed not through the dealer, but through an outside financial institution.” In fact, people apply for their car loans at an auto dealer about 80 percent of the time, according to J. D. Power & Associates.

Still, Mr. Brownback and the dealers won out, and now that they have, it’s worth examining some of the practices that had consumer groups so exercised. Think of this as a guide to the issues that the new agency may have tackled if it had only been able to.

Continue Reading: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/your-money/17money.html

The NAACP believes the tea party is racist. The tea party believes the NAACP is racist. And Pat Buchanan got into trouble recently by pointing out that if Elena Kagan is confirmed to the Supreme Court, there will not be a single Protestant Justice, although Protestants make up half the U.S. population and dominated the court for generations.

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.

How so?

Lyndon Johnson’s initial program for affirmative action was based on the 13th Amendment and on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which authorized the federal government to take actions in order to eliminate “the badges of slavery.” Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup.

Continue Reading: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703724104575379630952309408.html

We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies—especially the Internet—is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.

At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.

Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.

The idea of public funding for the press stirs deep unease in American culture. To many it seems inconsistent with our strong commitment, embodied in the First Amendment, to having a free press capable of speaking truth to power and to all of us. This press is a kind of public trust, a fourth branch of government. Can it be trusted when the state helps pay for it?

American journalism is not just the product of the free market, but of a hybrid system of private enterprise and public support. By the middle of the last century, daily newspapers were becoming natural monopolies in cities and communities across the country. Publishers and editors drew on the revenue to develop highly specialized expertise that enhanced coverage of economics, law, architecture, medicine, science and technology, foreign affairs and many other fields.

Meanwhile, the broadcast news industry was deliberately designed to have private owners operating within an elaborate system of public regulation, including requirements that stations cover public issues and expand the range of voices that could be heard. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld this system in the 1969 Red Lion decision as constitutional, even though it would have been entirely possible to limit government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate the news. In the 1960s, our network of public broadcasting was launched with direct public grants and a mission to produce high quality journalism free of government propaganda or censorship.

The institutions of the press we have inherited are the result of a mixed system of public and private cooperation. Trusting the market alone to provide all the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown—a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in the balance.

Ironically, we already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for much of our international news—especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes to us courtesy of British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC and taxes to support the World Service. The reliable public funding structure, as well as a set of professional norms that protect editorial freedom, has yielded a highly respected and globally powerful journalistic institution.

Continue Reading: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704629804575324782605510168.html