Telcos sold us 4G phones but our contracts are only 4G, free until June.
For those of us who do not want to pay extra )up to $10.70 a month, its switching back to 3G. When that happens, that bandwidth will surely be congested.

So much for free-market telcos where everyone copies the other carrier.

Sigh.
======================

SINGAPORE: Smartphone users may soon have to pay more to access 4G value-added services offered by the three telcos, StarHub, SingTel and M1.

StarHub has fired the first salvo, requiring its 4G subscribers to pay an additional S$2.14 per month from June 1 for its value-added services.

These subscribers have been enjoying free promotional 4G speed boost since the launch in September 2012.

In response to queries from Channel NewsAsia, StarHub's assistant vice president of mobility, Tian Ung Ping, said that "with all promotions, there is an end date. The free promotion, which was originally scheduled to end on 31 December 2013, has been extended till 31 May 2014."

According to StarHub, the usual rate for the 4G Speed Boost value-added service is S$10.70 a month.

Market experts said StarHub's move may prompt the other two telcos, M1 and SingTel, to revise their charges for 4G access.

Currently, both M1 and SingTel do not charge for their 4G value-added services, as part of a promotion for their 4G network.

An M1 spokesman told Channel NewsAsia that the telco is currently reviewing its charges with the upgrade of its 4G network to support speeds of up to 150Mbps and the introduction of high-quality voice calls over its 4G network in the coming months.

A SingTel spokesman said the company regularly reviews its price plans.

The spokesman added that SingTel's focus is on enhancing the mobile data experience for its customers by rolling-out network upgrades, such as doubling the maximum speed of its 4G service to 300Mbps this year.

Last year, the three telcos raised charges for excess local data usage.

- CNA/ms

The Economist magazine ( Issue 12 April) printed a brief snip on murder risk and quoted Singapore citizens having 1 chance in 256,000 compared to 1 chance in 13,500 in USA and 1 chance in 599 for someone living in the Honduras .

So well done Singapore!

A former customer service officer was jailed for 30 months on Tuesday for having sex with a 15-year-old girl.

According to The Straits Times, Chee Wei Tong, 24, who faced 10 charges, had admitted to three counts of underage sex at his Kang Ching Road flat and at a staircase landing of an HDB block in August 2012.

Chee, who was a grassroots volunteer at Punggol 21 community centre, is the fourth man to have been convicted and jailed for having sex with the girl.

His sentence is the stiffest to date.

The court heard that Chee came to know the girl in mid-2012 when she created an account on OkCupid, a dating and social networking website.

In the course of texting, she told him she was only 15 years old.

He told her that he had a girlfriend and practised polyamory - the philosophy of being romantically involved with multiple individuals at the same time.

He also told her that he had a fetish for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism, and encouraged the girl, then a virgin, to read up on this group of erotic practices, called BDSM in short.

She complied. The girl turned up at his home on Aug 1, 2012 when he had sex with her for the first time.

He also had kinky sex with her by slapping her face and buttocks a number of times and choking her lightly.

During the second week, she went to his home where she performed oral sex on him.

They met a third and final time between end-August and early September the same year when he took her to an HDB block in Punggol for sexual activities.

District Judge Hamidah Ibrahim noted that the girl went on to have sex with four other men after Chee.

She agreed with the prosecution that Chee had morally corrupted the girl. She also agreed with the prosecution that there had been aggravating factors.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Sharmila Sripathy-Shanaz had said Chee treated the minor as a sexual plaything and had to be held accountable for his base, irresponsible and illicit actions.

Chee, who is married, could have been jailed for up to 10 years and/or fined on each charge of having sex with a person aged below 16 years old.

http://singaporeseen.stomp.com.sg/singap...th-girl-15

Mad scramble for food at AGM

The Straits Times
Tuesday, Apr 15, 2014

I have been attending company annual general meetings (AGMs) regularly, and one constant feature is the rush for food immediately after such meetings.

Recently, I attended an AGM in a five-star hotel. After the meeting, there was a mad scramble to get to the adjoining room where finger food was served.

People started jostling as soon as the hotel staff opened the doors, and someone even fell on the steps.

I observed people piling several portions of food from each tray onto their plates before emptying the plates into food containers they had with them.

Some even hogged the buffet tongs, depriving others of the chance to try different dishes.

The food trays were emptied in less than half an hour. This meant that people who stayed behind to speak to key officials had nothing to eat.

Those who revealed their ugly side belong in the minority, and have no interest in the proceedings.

To avoid the hassle of buffets, some companies have adopted the practice of giving out lunch boxes or even food vouchers.

As these AGMs show, we have still some way to go in displaying consideration and graciousness.

Andrew Seow

hard to believe what the lorry driver said - "the lorry's brakes had failed"

MyPaper | Thursday, Apr 10, 2014 A motorcyclist was crushed to death in a large pile-up in Ang Mo Kio yesterday morning. The accident, which involved four vehicles and the motorcycle, happened around 9am near the junction of Ang Mo Kio Avenue 6 and Marymount Road. At the time, the motorcycle was behind a minibus and two cars at a red light at the traffic junction. Eyewitnesses said that a lorry then barrelled down the road and hit the motorcycle before slamming into the back of the minibus. An eyewitness told Lianhe Wanbao: "The rider flew off his bike, fell on the lorry's windshield, and was instantly crushed between the two vehicles." All that could be seen was a leg sticking out, he added. The two cars were damaged by the impact as well. Four people were taken to Tan Tock Seng Hospital with injuries. Lorry driver Su Chunsheng, 50, told the newspaper the accident happened because the lorry's brakes had failed. He added that the lorry had just been taken to a workshop to have its gearshift fixed, and he had collected the lorry yesterday morning. In a striking coincidence, all five vehicles in the pile-up were red in colour, and the incident happened at a red light. Lianhe Wanbao reported that some onlookers, wary that this portended bad luck, removed red-coloured items that they were wearing. - See more at: http://ride.asiaone.com/news/general/sto...I12eh.dpuf

COE supply to raise after 7-yr slide

According to estimates based on the number of cars scrapped in the first 2 months if the year, the number of COEs available in the May-July should be around 2,240 a month - or 25% more than current quota.

Love Compassion


A Life not Reflected is a Life not Worth Living.

In the early hours of March 31, prize-winning freelance journalist Clarissa Tan quietly passed away aged 42, after a year and half of battling colon cancer. A Malaysian by birth, Tan studied and worked in Singapore for 20 years before moving to London to complete a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She spent the last few years of her life living in London, writing TV reviews and cultural comment pieces as a staff writer for British current affairs and culture magazine The Spectator.

Tan was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1972. She moved to Singapore at the age of 15 and completed her secondary and tertiary education here, before staying on as a freelance journalist for 20 years.

In 2007 her piece “The Visit” won The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul memorial prize, awarded for ‘the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer’. Her writing so impressed Fraser Nelson, now editor of The Spectator, that he asked her to move to London and work with the publication.

It is Nelson who now offers up the most eloquent rendering of her life, in his tribute ‘Remembering Clarissa Tan, 1972-2014’:

“On her desk, there is a list, headed ‘advantages of my current situation’. She had found 23 upsides. This is — was — Clarissa all over. She was defined by indefatigable optimism, humanity and love of life.”

Tan was a writer of remarkable breadth, and wrote for titles as varied as The Business Times (Singapore), asia! (an online blogging platform), Reader’s Digest Asia and The Daily Mail (UK), amongst others. Her topics spanned the financial world, the arts, lifestyle, education, and cultural commentary, and she was also working on a novel.


However among her most moving, poignant and beautifully-written pieces are the three in The Spectator (“I am not my cancer”, “This coming year, I want to live” and “The ideal death show”) in which she deals with the topic of death – specifically, her own death. In “This coming year, I want to live”, just a few months after she was diagnosed with cancer, she writes:

“This coming year, I resolve to do more of the things that make me feel awakened rather than dead. I’ll lean into uncertainty a bit more, and see what treasures lie there. I’ll try to say what I mean and mean what I say. I aspire to open my heart as much as possible to friends, and to vulnerability, and to love. I want to fashion my own rainbow, my own groovy disco ball.

“This coming year, I want to live.”

As of Tuesday April 1, the top six most-read stories on The Spectator’s website were all by Clarissa Tan. It is perhaps the most fitting tribute of all for an incredibly talented writer.

http://theindependent.sg/the-late-claris...singapore/

Recently, I met a chap who was had worked in HP for more than 15 years (being through the two different M&As) and we discussed on HP's business strategy through the different CEOs (Carly, Hurd, Apotheker).

I was doing some googling and found that HP have recently settled a shareholder suit over the disastrous purchase of Autonomy.

Here's the thing, baring outright fraud, poor business decisions are part and parcel of the inherent risks in any investment. How then are shareholders justified to sue the company on the basis of drop in the share price as a result of poor strategy? Seriously, I can't see this happening in an Asian context.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/0...8H20140401

Selina Lum
The Straits Times

Saturday, Apr 05, 2014


A former sales executive at Hewlett-Packard Singapore (HP) has sued the IT giant for more than $600,000 in commission for closing a deal with electronic payments operator Network for Electronic Transfers (Nets).

The main issue in dispute is whether the $5.4 million Nets contract is considered "new business", which would entitle her to the commission.

Ms Corinna Chin, 52, contends that she had won Nets back as a customer from rival IBM and the contract qualifies as new business. But HP, which rejected her claim for the commission, contends that it had never lost Nets as a customer.

Ms Chin, now unemployed, joined HP in 2005 and was paid a basic salary and incentive compensation based on performance.

For the financial year 2012, a new way of measuring performance was introduced for "new business".

In March 2012, Nets bought new computer hardware and software from HP. Nets had been using a computer system from HP but in 2010, it decided to buy new servers from IBM.

Ms Chin's lawyer, Mr P.E. Ashokan, said in his opening statement that she got many congratulatory e-mails from HP's management for winning Nets back as a customer. In April 2012, she submitted a claim for commissions but it was rejected. On June 8, she lodged a complaint against the sales director for the rejection.

Ten days later, she was retrenched. HP, which did not consider the Nets contract as new business, calculated the commission due to her as $229,370.60.

But Ms Chin said she should get $856,740.14 as the Nets deal qualifies as new business and sued her former employer for the difference of $627,369.54.

HP, represented by Mr Gregory Vijayendran, said even though Nets bought servers from IBM, it continued to use HP's servers, had an ongoing agreement with HP to maintain the servers and paid software licence fees for them.

The case opened in the High Court on Tuesday for a five-day hearing.

selinal@sph.com.sg

Ian Poh
The Straits Times

Saturday, Apr 05, 2014


A former senior associate engineer with the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) was fined $4,000 yesterday for stealing a $1,800 laptop that belonged to the agency.

On Sept 6 last year, Lee Kian Heng noticed that the HP Elitebook issued three days earlier to his colleague to use on projects was unattended and unsecured by a cable wire. He walked past his colleague's desk twice before deciding to steal the computer.

Lee, 33, reformatted the laptop and reset it to its factory settings so he could use it, deleting data classified as "restricted", said court documents. The laptop was later recovered from his home.

Calling for at least a large fine, Deputy Public Prosecutor Winston Man pointed out that Lee, then 32, had at the time been working for an agency which handled sensitive information.

Defence lawyer Louis Joseph said Lee, who was formally dismissed by DSTA the following month, had taken what "looked like a shiny object" in a moment of "unbelievable stupidity". Lee took the laptop for personal use and had no intention of selling it, added Mr Joseph.

The maximum penalty for theft is jail of three years and a fine.