How to ride a bicycle, how to read, how to clean their bedrooms -these are just a few of the things we teach our children. But one of the most important lessons that we can pass on to the next generation is too often neglected. Teaching children about money and credit helps them to build responsible spending behaviours that can last a lifetime. Follow these five tips for teaching your children healthy money habits.

1. Start Small - Young children can learn valuable money management lessons through their interaction and activities with parents. Use daily errand activities like going to the supermarket or bank to teach kids impromptu lessons about budgeting and money. Give your children toy money and encourage them to "play store". There are also several children's books that address money and budgeting issues. Reading and discussing books like "The Money Tree" and "If you Made a Million with your kids" can help them understand how to spend wisely.

Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People's Assembly, sent a message of greetings to Bashar Al-Assad, president of Syria, on the occasion of the 43rd anniversary of the March 8 revolution in Syria. In the message Kim Yong Nam said that the Syrian people have smashed the moves of the imperialists and Zionists and defended the dignity of the nation and the sovereignty of the country for 43 years, rallied close around the Arab Socialist Baath Party. He sincerely wished the president and people of Syria greater successes in their work for foiling the moves of the outside forces to isolate and stifle Syria, stepping up the modernization of the country and for fair and comprehensive settlement of the Middle East issue. He expressed the conviction that the good relations of friendship and cooperation between the two countries will continue to vigorously consolidate and develop.

Politics has no business in business proposals, right? Exactly what I said when I ran into this sentence fragment: the abolition of personal freedom in the US under the Patriot act in part of a business plan discussing the company's decision to put their community access servers somewhere in Europe - but not in the U.K or Scandinavia. Now, in point of fact I think the idea that data kept in most of Europe is safer from government inspection than is data kept in the U.S. is utterly delusional - in reality things like the FBI request to Google are unusual enough in the U.S. to merit public attention, but are an accepted, and unnoticed, part of everyday reality across continental Europe.

Airport screeners are using new technology to find explosives instead of hunting for tweezers, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday. Locked and armored cockpit doors and air marshals on planes are part of a switch in main security concern from hijackers to people who might want to blow up airplanes, Chertoff said in a speech at an event here hosted by the Commonwealth Club. "The things we're really worried about are explosives," Chertoff said. Airport screeners are being retrained "to move them away from looking for things like nail clippers to more sophisticated chemicals and detonating devices," he said. "We have now set an aggressive timetable to complete deployment of the TWIC card," Chertoff said. "Our goal is to have these cards in the hands of port workers this year with those workers undergoing background checks. "The card will be for hundreds of thousands of people who need to access ports on a regular basis. "It will include biometric technology so we can make sure that the cardholder is really who he or she says that he or she is, and will give us the confidence about who is entering our ports," Chertoff said.

"The "blog phenomenon" seems to have been growing to a frenzy over the last few months. Everyone has a blog, reads a blog, or wants a blog. At a fundamental level, blogs are the true promise of the Internet encapsulated in a new four letter word. Blogs give everyone a soapbox, a place to state or shout their mind, whether it be about the tedium of their own lives, politics, or eLearning. Author David Weinberger has recently paraphrased Andy Warhol and said that 'on the web, everyone is famous to fifteen people.' Blogs are exactly the kind of tool that make this possible, and increasingly accurate. They are the first foolproof tool of the Internet's "me" generation.

Live ID will be required for nearly all of Microsoft's software and services going forward. Microsoft announced this week that its Passport system, which allows customers to use one login name to access many websites and online stores, will be going through an upgrade. While some have predicted that Passport will be axed, the case isn't so. Instead, Passport will be highly integrated into Microsoft's Live platform.

The new service, called Live ID, will coexist and be used with such other services as Xbox Live, Windows Live, Office Live, and other Microsoft online services such as MSN. Unfortunately however, privacy groups are complaining once again that any type of singular login such as Passport, pose a great security risk for end users. With Live IDs being required for nearly all of Microsoft's services and products going forward, tracking customer behaviors and actions, and linking everything back to a user's Windows install will be easier than ever -- for both Microsoft and its cooperatives.

A new type of Trojan is making the rounds on the Internet, hijacking files and then leaving messages for the victims, demanding a ransom to return access. Called "Cryzip" by some antivirus firms and "Zippo.a" by others, the Trojan blocks access to files stored in 44 formats -- including .doc, .jpg, and .pdf -- by grouping them in a password-protected .zip file. The Trojan then deletes the original files and eliminates itself. Left behind along with the encrypted files is a ransom note, riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, that demands that users pay $300 in electronic currency to gain access to their files. The author of the note and Trojan writes that reporting the incident to the police will not help because "they do not know password." A text file includes instructions for victims to transfer money to one of nearly 100 accounts run by money-transfer site e-gold.

Hackers have managed to get Microsoft's Windows XP operating system running on an Apple Mac computer. The success ends a competition started to see if the feat was even possible when Apple unveiled computers that used Intel chips. The pair who managed the feat won $13,854 (£7,895) in prize money for their trouble. The software used to put Windows on the Mac is now being circulated so others can try to replicate the success.

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In January 2006, the first Apple Mac computers using Intel chips were unveiled at the Macworld show by company boss Steve Jobs. Soon after the unveiling, Mac enthusiast Colin Nederkoorn kicked off a competition to see if it was possible for the two operating systems to run independently on the same machine. To tempt entrants, he put up $100 of his own money - a prize fund that gradually grew as news about the competition spread. The rules of the competition stressed that to win hackers must get both Windows XP and Apple's OSX running on the same machine and neither operating system must conflict with the other.