Life's Great Expectations!

by Kimberly Palmer Wednesday, April 15, 2009 Think married couples have it easy? Or that you should get your pension policy to pay out as much as possible, as soon as possible? Well, think again. Predicting that you'll die too early--or too late--can leave you and your spouse in a financial crunch. New research upends these 7 common myths about marriage and retirement: Single people need less money. It's true that that single people spend less money each year than couples, but at all ages over 65, they spend more of their income than couples do, according to research by Michael Hurd, senior economist at Rand. Then, after age 65, single people's income goes down by three percent a year until it dwindles to 20 percent of its starting value at age 95. (For those at age 65, the probability of surviving to age 95 is around 11 percent.) Couples, meanwhile, maintain their income until the oldest member reaches age 79, when wealth starts to decline at around 3 percent a year

Blog post gives another perspective on the cancelled ASEAN summit in Thailand. By Sumner Lemon 14 Apr 2009 SINGAPORE, 14 APRIL 2009 - Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs George Yeo described his evacuation from the cancelled ASEAN summit in a blog post on Monday, adding his personal perspective to media coverage of anti-government protests in Thailand. The summit of Southeast Asian leaders, scheduled to be held in Pattaya, Thailand, was cancelled on Saturday after supporters of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, known as Red Shirts, broke through a police cordon and made their way into the Royal Cliff Beach Resort Hotel where the meetings were to be held. The Red Shirt protests later expanded to Bangkok, where they continue to clash with Thai soldiers and police who are trying to restore order. According to Yeo, ministers attending the Pattaya summit saw few indications of serious trouble until early Saturday, when Red Shirt protesters, demanding the

Business continuity preparation needs to move beyond just IT hardware and data centricity. By Gerald Wee 13 Apr 2009 SINGAPORE, 13 APRIL 2009 – Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore see the need for business continuity and have taken a number of steps towards mitigating business impact should disaster strike. However, company perceptions of what constitutes adequate business continuity preparations are still not holistic enough, and tend to focus on information systems and electronic data. According to a research group AMI Partners study, of medium-sized businesses in Singapore, 96 per cent of respondents to a survey on business continuity believe that disasters such as fires (44 per cent), utility outages (17 per cent), epidemics (12 per cent), terrorist attacks (8 per cent), and cyber threats (8 per cent) will impact their organisations. “About 71 per cent of the respondents have a trained business continuity management team, and this does make it seem that c

New card will allow stored value top-ups to be done at most payment terminals By Melissa Chua 13 Apr 2009 SINGAPORE, 13 APRIL 2009 – Singapore’s electronics payment provider Network for Electronic Transfers (better known as NETS), has announced plans to launch a contactless stored value payment card which allows for automatic cash value top-ups. The new card, which can be used to pay for road tolls, public transport fares, retail purchases and bills, is expected to provide greater convenience to consumers in Singapore who hold deposit accounts in DBS Bank, Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), United Overseas Bank (UOB) and Standard Chartered Bank. NETS’s current stored value card offering, the cashcard, is not contactless, does not allow for automatic top-ups, and cannot be used to pay for public transport. Anytime, anywhere According to NETS, the stored value of the new contactless card can be topped up, with money debited from the consumers’ bank account, anytime

Apr 13, 2009 By Telecom Asia Staff telecomasia.net Malaysian operator Maxis has launched the world’s first commercial mobile payments service for point-of-sale transactions using Visa’s payWave service based on Near Field Communications (NFC) technology. The new service, branded Maxis FastTap and offered in conjunction with Visa and Maybank, is compatible with just one handset, a Nokia 6212 classic with an embedded NFC chipset. Maybank Visa account holders can download their Visa payWave credit account details directly to the handset over the Maxis network. Payments can then be made by waving the handset in front of a payWave contactless reader. Visa says 1,800 merchant outlets currently accept Visa payWave in Malaysia. Customers can also use FastTap to pay for toll, transit, parking and theme park charges at over 3,000 Touch ‘n Go points nationwide. The Nokia 6212 comes preloaded with RM10 ($2.75) worth of Touch ‘n Go credit. Visa has

By Kenneth Corbin April 6, 2009 WASHINGTON -- Few tech policy debates are plumped up with more rhetoric than those concerning Net neutrality and privacy restrictions for advertisers. It should be a noisy year at the Federal Communications Commission. Here at the Cable Show, the annual conference hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, advisors to the three current commissioners outlined some of the simmering issues that are likely to boil up at the FCC this year, and those two are on the short list. Rick Chessen, acting chief of staff for interim FCC Chairman Michael Copps, said the agency could move toward adding to its Internet policy statement a fifth principle that would explicitly bar ISPs from discriminating against certain traffic on their networks. "The principle would be one of nondiscrimination, but you would recognize the need for reasonable network management," Chessen said. The FCC's broadband principles comprise

Sun, Apr 05, 2009 - The Straits Times My parents have a loving relationship, but I knew I could not live my life around a husband By Lee Wei Ling My father became prime minister in 1959, when I was just four years old. Inevitably, most people know me as Lee Kuan Yew’s daughter. My every move, every word, is scrutinised and sometimes subject to criticism. One friend said I lived in a glass house. After my father’s recent comment on my lack of culinary skills, another observed: ‘You live in a house without any walls.’ Fortunately, I am not easily embarrassed. As long as my conscience is clear, what other people say of me does not bother me. Indeed, I am open about my life since the more I try to conceal from the public, the wilder the speculation becomes. My father said of my mother two weeks ago: ‘My wife was…not a traditional wife. She was educated, a professional woman… We had Ah Mahs, reliable, professional, dependable. (My wife) came back every lunchtime to have lunch with the

By Kenneth Corbin April 3, 2009 Two key senators announced on Wednesday a sweeping bill to reorganize the government's approach to cybersecurity operations, calling for a more effective partnership with private industry to protect the nation's digital infrastructure. John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, joined with Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, to bring forward legislation that aims to consolidate and strengthen the government's much-maligned approach to defending against cyberattacks. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs -- from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records -- the list goes on," Rockefeller said in a statement announcing the bill. "It's an understatement to say that cybersecurity is one of the most important issues we face. The increasingly connected nature of our lives only amplifies our vulnerability to cyber

By Sean Michael Kerner April 2, 2009 Conficker -- the malicious worm expected to activate today -- did not cause widespread computer meltdowns around the globe. But considering that Microsoft patched the flaw five months ago, it's not clear why Conficker ever became a concern to begin with. So why was it an issue -- and will it be an issue again? The rise of Conficker, as an event and as a media phenomenon, has as much to do with user inaction as it does with the actual threat posed by the worm itself. The Conficker worm is proof positive of the fact that despite security updates and media reports, users can be the weak link in the security ecosystem unless motivated to action. "Unfortunately the majority of the work that we are doing now is unnecessary if we had reacted quicker in the first place, patching immediately after the fix was released," Wolfgang Kandek, Qualys's CTO, told InternetNews.com . "The delay in applying the patc