You do realize that students in Japan and other places drop out of high school too, right? I think the 6% is about right for those that simply stop after middle school. Some can't cut academics, some can't afford it and some need to work in a family business. Many drop out after that for the same reasons.
Japanese high schools are also diverse in ways that most US ones are not. You have to test to get into them. For an "elite" high school that would put you on a path for Todai you'd have to test above high school graduate level to even get in at 9th grade. There are also what we would consider vo-tech schools that train people to work on assembly lines and really low high schools that don't do much more than warehouse them. High schools full of similar students with similar abilities. In the US it's about what zip code you live in, so we have highly diverse populations that are harder to teach.
I'm going to at least partially disagree with this statement:
"In the end, the person bringing porn into a community that criminalizes it has to make the decision to move or change the local law."
In the common example of someone downloading porn that's legal where it was produced but ilegal locally you have bypassed the community entirely. The inside of my house should not be governed by the community standards, only the community should.
The only case where the community has "standing" is if the material is somehow republished to the community. If you stick a monitor on your lawn with 24x7 porn playing on it, the community has a right to restict you from doing so. If you getting a copy of Playboy requires the local market to carry on the newstand - again the community has a right to have an opinion. So does the merchant.
Maybe SCOTUS is looking for a better case. This one isn't great. From TFA her complaint was that it "was an unconstitutional violation of her First Amendment rights because it made her fear prosecution for publishing her work on the Internet." Her fear of prosecution does not give her "standing" in the legal sense. If she publishes and gets prosecuted in Alabama --- then she has standing and it's worth the courts time to bother with.
You are right that Sony is like a Hydra, or a zaibatsu to be more precise. But they put a content side, IP protection gaijin in charge as CEO. He's from Sony Entertainment and before that CBS Television.
Putting him in charge was a solid kick to the nuts for all of Sony's hardware businesses. He doesn't control everything, but he functions as a tie breaker when the two sides disagree. And he is *always* going to come down on the side of more locked down content. I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to delay the PS3 until the copy protection could be made even more strict was his personal decision.
Maybe that what they wanted when they gave him the job. If so, it was stupid. I thought at the time that he was put in as a "chainsaw CEO" - someone that could do things (like fire lots of people) that a japanese CEO couldn't/wouldn't do. After he does all the demolition the board is *shocked* at the devastation, fires him with a golden handshake, and moves on with a leaner company. He hasn't done that. Now it seem more likely that they decided that for the 21st century "content is king" and didn't think it through to the damage it would cause the the company as a whole.
The pattern is usually that the aquirer's stock goes down (DELL) and the aquired's stock goes up. Since alienware is privately held you can't profit from it. You could short sell DELL. It's a terrible stock in a terrible business, this would just be one more reason for DELL to go down.
"I'm not saying he's an idiot, I just think he's waxing enthusiastic on a technology he really doesn't understand, even after 6 or more years"
Very true, but that isn't his job. His job is to find people that *do* understand it and put them in charge of businesses. He's done very well at that. I think he overpayed for MySpace, but it was a good aquisition. the Internet grabs hw's been doing for the last couple years have looked pretty smart to me. Check out their web site, they own a *lot* more than Fox News and TV Guide.
compare that to Time Warner. A company so clueless that they got bought out by Steve Case/AOL.
really nothing new. the music itself sounds a lot like Charles Dodge's music based on electromagnetic fields from 35 years ago. I was hoping they were actually making good music instead of just converying numbers into frequencies. "The Fibonaccis" music is a lot more fun.
Don't tell me anyone really expects him to respect an embargo, do they?
PS: I expected to see Carolyn Porco or at least some NASA PR flack on NASA TV at 11am PST with this. Instead they were just running some grainy archival stuff that looked circa Gemini. disappointing.
They dont' have to declare nuclear war or any such primative thing anymore. Why nuke the US when they own so much of it? If they get pissed all they have to do is stop buying US treasury bills and our economy will implode.
"Unfortuniatly, we're competing with Asia, which doesn't value things such as human rights."
Niether does the current US administration, so all things are still equal. If there's an imbalance it's that the asian populations seem to be more content with their tyrants than the US. but we actually *elected* ours, so what does that say about us?
"China has a billion workers to feed. They have a virtually unlimited supply of labor."
Those are the twin devils that China has to deal with. They don't have an unlimited labor supply. They have a rapidly ageing workforce due to stringent population controls. They are looking at a very big imbalance between young workers and old retirees. They need to "make hay while the sun shines" right now and hope they can put some away for later. India does indeed have a nearly unlimied young educated population with a high birth rate - that's not all gravy either.
But they do have a billion people to feed. They can't feed them without imports. And H5N1's impact on humans is pretty theoretical, but its effect on poultry populations is already here. The chinese eat a lot of poultry. If the chinese poultry supply is decimated (fairly likely) there could be mass famine. It's not easy to feed a billion people. They can't eat those blobjects they make for Wal-Mart.
Even with hundreds of cable channels we don't get "narrowcast" ads. The technology to do it is all there already. Why do I currently get tampon ads during a midnight episode of Evangelion? Nobody thinks that is the target market. The tampon maker had no idea that their ad would show up there. What they buy are these large horizontal "media buys". They make a "Buy" for a few million $ that includes spots all over the place. For the same $ that it would take to buy targeted time on the Lifetime Network, they can get the same amount of time there and a bunch of other ad spots that are basically "free". A favorite of some friends of mine that worked together in the early 90's is the company's placement of a full back cover ad for a rather arcane pice of sofware in Field and Stream magazine. Yeah, it was a stupid place for the ad and there are million of better things you could spend the $ on. But it was one of those "media buy" packages. For the same $ that it cost to put it on the back cover of Byte and PC World you could do one of these deals and get those two and Field and Stream and Ladies Home Journal and a few others as well - so why not?
"The system" isn't set up to narrowcast its ads to those who are the likelies customers. If they don't use what they could do now, they are unlikely to use this type of thing from Google.
Sure, they could wake up and smell the money. It's a pretty hide bound industry though.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As someone else with teachers in the family, I agree 100%. It's not even the teacher ratio, primary school ratios here are typically ~ 20:1. As long as the entire focus is on the standarized test scores and minimizing at any cost the percantage that fail - you get stuck. You can't teach, all you can do is re-drill the things that will be on the test that 15% of the students still are not getting.
The 15% are unteachable, not primarily because they are "stupid", but because they have no support structure at home at all. A kid that hasn't eaten dinner or breakfast is not a good learner. That kid with a parent that always gets the kid to school late can't get the school's free breakfast. Teacher's, in the real world, have no power to change those things.
As someone with gifted kids in the family, I can tell you that those programs don't help. My kids schools have a "gifted and talented" pullout program. They are supposed to be excused from drudge work in the normal class to do mare challenging work in the pullouts. That doesn't happen. The drudge work is still required but there's now additional work. The work is typically not useful - a class project on a borking book that's a couple grade levels higher, no additional science education but a requirement for a science project. The message is clear "shut up and be average or we will assign you more work". To no surprise, my kids no longer want anything to do with those programs.
Probably Jet Blue, maybe Skywest. Doesn't really matter which really.
1) try to convince your people that you are not going bankrupt like all other airlines, that the pension/401k is safe and their benefits are not about to be cut. Yuo can't do that because all those things are probably going to happen. That's a problem.
2) Try to convince them that their jobs are not going to be outsourced to Mumbai. don't get the CIO to do that - he's aware of corporate's long term cost reduction plans and he would be lying through his teeth. Or is he a good liar? I guess he'd have to be or he wouldn't be CIO.
3) Make the web reservations department part of SALES and not part of IT. Right now you are a cost center, not a revenue center on the old org chart. woking under sales sucks, but they have the budgets that don't get squeezed. Those who bring in the business are more important than those who don't.
4) Determine core competencies. Is IT considered a "core compentcy" of the overall business? I bet it isn't. do they task you with maintainence and throw million$ at JD Edwards or PeopleSoft when they want a big important project fubar^H^H^H^H^Hcompleted? IF you can't convince upper management that what you are doing is a core competency of the company there is no hope that you will be anything other than maginilized.
Hard to say anything from a single case. She may indeed have caught it the same way as her brother. I saw in another article that she hadn't started Tamiflu until after she was already ill, when it's not expected to work as well.
It impacts manufacturing costs, but in an interesting way. If you are NASA or General Dynamics, it would be a little bit cheaper to make, but no big deal. The interesting bit is that you should be able to make a decent nozzle with 1/10th the manufacturing/machining capability. It reduces the costs of entry, probably down to the level of a NASCAR crew's machine shop.
So, not truly revolutionary, but "disruptive" tech in the sense that it puts the ability to make decent nozzles in the hands of many many more people.
Yes, it's a bad analogy. A better one that I've been using for ~15 years is an office building. Doors in an office building are there to be opened. If you have a door to your private office that opens on a public hallway -- lock it or expect that people will walk in from time to time. Some kid walking the halls and twisting doorknobs is not trespassing, stealing, or anything else except maybe being a pain in the butt. Even if you put a little "private" sign on the door you should expect people to open it from time to time and they are still not trespassing or stealing.
Similarly, network services are there with the expectation of being used. If you don't want them used, the burden is on you to restrict them. If you don't you have no grounds to complain.
As an aside, I think law enforcement hates the idea of this for the same reason they hate all forms of anonymity - it gives plausible deniability that some particular person comitted some particular crime.
They are saying that it traces back to whoever had the "object of promoting". In your example you may only be liable if they determine that the original creators of Grokster had that object.
It's a really vague clause - they will have to rehear this some time in the future on some other case and issue clearer guidance
"According to these rumors, Microsoft recognized that Win3.1 was the most pirated piece of software ever"
Actually, it wasn't. DOS was more pirated. But both of them came bundled with some PCs (lawfully, even more unlawfully of course). I saw the stats from the SPA on a regular basis back then. The usual #1 was QEMM386. It didn't come bundled with PCs, but without it a 386 or 486 was just a faster 286. Many people didn't even know they had it, since it was unlawfully installed by many/most/all screwdriver shops.
The point is valid though. I dealt with lots of large corporate accounts. That where the $$ was. Virtually every one of those accounts started with an in house nerd and a pirate QEMM on his home PC. He'd come in to work and after loading a boat anchor like a Banyan network stack there was almost no way he could launch WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3.
"Our local "Cinema Saver" (that is the actual name they operate under) gets all the new releases about two or three weeks after they hit the mainstream theaters."
Most of these get the print they run from a 1st run house that has had it in heavy rotation for those 2-3 weeks. They range from slightly scratched to almost unwatchable. Add to that the typically poorly set up projectors, poor sound systems, etc and you no longer have a reason to see LOTR in all its glory and may as well wait for the DVD.
Fascinating.. but fairly off topic. A 25% chance isn't that large. Large cross-cultural studies of blood types and other markers show that about 10% of all children globally don't have the father that the birth cert (or whatever) says thay have. 25% seems reasonable in the hunting/gathering communities that seem to have shaped a lot of our behavior patterns. Those hunting parties are sometimes gone a long long time and that effeminate geek that stays behind designing a better arrow point may not be as gay as he looks.
The clan certainly benefits from a smallish percentage of "uncles" that don't provide for their children, but rather for the nieces/nephews or the clan at large (still mostly relatives).
There isn't the same benefit for lesbians though. They certainly know that their children are theirs. Seems to me that game theory would predict gay men but only bisexual women. A good bonding behavior for when the men are away hunting, but guanteed 50% progeny is too good a bet to select for completely gay women. I'm sure there is a dissertation in there for someone...though you'd need to fing the right grad advisor.
obOnTopic and in the desire for full disclosure, the author of this article holds long positions in GERN and STEM. Go Stemcells! Go Telomerase!
I agree, you would think that if there were a "gay gene" that it would have been removed from natural selection.
Nope. The ringer is when you can't be certain of paternitiy. For a male, it's when the chances that the child of your mate are less than 4:1 in favor of you being the father. If there is a 1 in 4 chance that your child is not really your child, your genes have a better chance of propogating by supporting the children of your sister than by supporting the children that may be yours.
The society/clan benefits from having a certain percentage of males that concentrate on the nieces/nephews rather than the son/daughter. The clan also benefits from a certain percentage that knows at a fairly early age that they will not need to plan to suport a child. It's a lot easier, even now, to plan a career as an artist, actor, musician, write, etc. if you are fairly certain that you will not be getting married and having kids.
So? Gold is useful, but that doesn't make it valuable. Water is even more valuable, but does not command the price point of gold. In the actual event of a "Vingian" sigularity, even semi-mature nanotech can extract gold from seawater and wipe out the value of gold reserves. Demand/supply = value. The only thing you can buy now that would hold any value is land - they ain't making any more of it. you can build gomi islands in the sea and you can grab land on other platets, but it's not the same value as good old terran continental land mass.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that students in Japan and other places drop out of high school too, right? I think the 6% is about right for those that simply stop after middle school. Some can't cut academics, some can't afford it and some need to work in a family business. Many drop out after that for the same reasons.
Japanese high schools are also diverse in ways that most US ones are not. You have to test to get into them. For an "elite" high school that would put you on a path for Todai you'd have to test above high school graduate level to even get in at 9th grade. There are also what we would consider vo-tech schools that train people to work on assembly lines and really low high schools that don't do much more than warehouse them. High schools full of similar students with similar abilities. In the US it's about what zip code you live in, so we have highly diverse populations that are harder to teach.
I'm going to at least partially disagree with this statement:
"In the end, the person bringing porn into a community that criminalizes it has to make the decision to move or change the local law."
In the common example of someone downloading porn that's legal where it was produced but ilegal locally you have bypassed the community entirely. The inside of my house should not be governed by the community standards, only the community should.
The only case where the community has "standing" is if the material is somehow republished to the community. If you stick a monitor on your lawn with 24x7 porn playing on it, the community has a right to restict you from doing so. If you getting a copy of Playboy requires the local market to carry on the newstand - again the community has a right to have an opinion. So does the merchant.
Maybe SCOTUS is looking for a better case. This one isn't great. From TFA her complaint was that it "was an unconstitutional violation of her First Amendment rights because it made her fear prosecution for publishing her work on the Internet." Her fear of prosecution does not give her "standing" in the legal sense. If she publishes and gets prosecuted in Alabama --- then she has standing and it's worth the courts time to bother with.
You are right that Sony is like a Hydra, or a zaibatsu to be more precise. But they put a content side, IP protection gaijin in charge as CEO. He's from Sony Entertainment and before that CBS Television.
Putting him in charge was a solid kick to the nuts for all of Sony's hardware businesses. He doesn't control everything, but he functions as a tie breaker when the two sides disagree. And he is *always* going to come down on the side of more locked down content. I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to delay the PS3 until the copy protection could be made even more strict was his personal decision.
Maybe that what they wanted when they gave him the job. If so, it was stupid. I thought at the time that he was put in as a "chainsaw CEO" - someone that could do things (like fire lots of people) that a japanese CEO couldn't/wouldn't do. After he does all the demolition the board is *shocked* at the devastation, fires him with a golden handshake, and moves on with a leaner company. He hasn't done that. Now it seem more likely that they decided that for the 21st century "content is king" and didn't think it through to the damage it would cause the the company as a whole.
The pattern is usually that the aquirer's stock goes down (DELL) and the aquired's stock goes up. Since alienware is privately held you can't profit from it. You could short sell DELL. It's a terrible stock in a terrible business, this would just be one more reason for DELL to go down.
"I'm not saying he's an idiot, I just think he's waxing enthusiastic on a technology he really doesn't understand, even after 6 or more years"
Very true, but that isn't his job. His job is to find people that *do* understand it and put them in charge of businesses. He's done very well at that. I think he overpayed for MySpace, but it was a good aquisition. the Internet grabs hw's been doing for the last couple years have looked pretty smart to me. Check out their web site, they own a *lot* more than
Fox News and TV Guide.
compare that to Time Warner. A company so clueless that they got bought out by Steve Case/AOL.
really nothing new. the music itself sounds a lot like Charles Dodge's music based on electromagnetic fields from 35 years ago. I was hoping they were actually making good music instead of just converying numbers into frequencies. "The Fibonaccis" music is a lot more fun.
Don't tell me anyone really expects him to respect an embargo, do they?
PS: I expected to see Carolyn Porco or at least some NASA PR flack on NASA TV at 11am PST with this. Instead they were just running some grainy archival stuff that looked circa Gemini. disappointing.
He's had a banner running on this for several hours before /.
They dont' have to declare nuclear war or any such primative thing anymore. Why nuke the US when they own so much of it? If they get pissed all they have to do is stop buying US treasury bills and our economy will implode.
"Unfortuniatly, we're competing with Asia, which doesn't value things such as human rights."
Niether does the current US administration, so all things are still equal. If there's an imbalance it's that the asian populations seem to be more content with their tyrants than the US. but we actually *elected* ours, so what does that say about us?
"China has a billion workers to feed. They have a virtually unlimited supply of labor."
Those are the twin devils that China has to deal with. They don't have an unlimited labor supply. They have a rapidly ageing workforce due to stringent population controls. They are looking at a very big imbalance between young workers and old retirees. They need to "make hay while the sun shines" right now and hope they can put some away for later. India does indeed have a nearly unlimied young educated population with a high birth rate - that's not all gravy either.
But they do have a billion people to feed. They can't feed them without imports. And H5N1's impact on humans is pretty theoretical, but its effect on poultry populations is already here. The chinese eat a lot of poultry. If the chinese poultry supply is decimated (fairly likely) there could be mass famine. It's not easy to feed a billion people. They can't eat those blobjects they make for Wal-Mart.
Even with hundreds of cable channels we don't get "narrowcast" ads. The technology to do it is all there already. Why do I currently get tampon ads during a midnight episode of Evangelion? Nobody thinks that is the target market. The tampon maker had no idea that their ad would show up there. What they buy are these large horizontal "media buys". They make a "Buy" for a few million $ that includes spots all over the place. For the same $ that it would take to buy targeted time on the Lifetime Network, they can get the same amount of time there and a bunch of other ad spots that are basically "free". A favorite of some friends of mine that worked together in the early 90's is the company's placement of a full back cover ad for a rather arcane pice of sofware in Field and Stream magazine. Yeah, it was a stupid place for the ad and there are million of better things you could spend the $ on. But it was one of those "media buy" packages. For the same $ that it cost to put it on the back cover of Byte and PC World you could do one of these deals and get those two and Field and Stream and Ladies Home Journal and a few others as well - so why not?
"The system" isn't set up to narrowcast its ads to those who are the likelies customers. If they don't use what they could do now, they are unlikely to use this type of thing from Google.
Sure, they could wake up and smell the money. It's a pretty hide bound industry though.
As someone else with teachers in the family, I agree 100%. It's not even the teacher ratio, primary school ratios here are typically ~ 20:1. As long as the entire focus is on the standarized test scores and minimizing at any cost the percantage that fail - you get stuck. You can't teach, all you can do is re-drill the things that will be on the test that 15% of the students still are not getting.
The 15% are unteachable, not primarily because they are "stupid", but because they have no support structure at home at all. A kid that hasn't eaten dinner or breakfast is not a good learner. That kid with a parent that always gets the kid to school late can't get the school's free breakfast. Teacher's, in the real world, have no power to change those things.
As someone with gifted kids in the family, I can tell you that those programs don't help. My kids schools have a "gifted and talented" pullout program. They are supposed to be excused from drudge work in the normal class to do mare challenging work in the pullouts. That doesn't happen. The drudge work is still required but there's now additional work. The work is typically not useful - a class project on a borking book that's a couple grade levels higher, no additional science education but a requirement for a science project. The message is clear "shut up and be average or we will assign you more work". To no surprise, my kids no longer want anything to do with those programs.
Probably Jet Blue, maybe Skywest. Doesn't really matter which really.
1) try to convince your people that you are not going bankrupt like all other airlines, that the pension/401k is safe and their benefits are not about to be cut. Yuo can't do that because all those things are probably going to happen. That's a problem.
2) Try to convince them that their jobs are not going to be outsourced to Mumbai. don't get the CIO to do that - he's aware of corporate's long term cost reduction plans and he would be lying through his teeth. Or is he a good liar? I guess he'd have to be or he wouldn't be CIO.
3) Make the web reservations department part of SALES and not part of IT. Right now you are a cost center, not a revenue center on the old org chart. woking under sales sucks, but they have the budgets that don't get squeezed. Those who bring in the business are more important than those who don't.
4) Determine core competencies. Is IT considered a "core compentcy" of the overall business? I bet it isn't. do they task you with maintainence and throw million$ at JD Edwards or PeopleSoft when they want a big important project fubar^H^H^H^H^Hcompleted? IF you can't convince upper management that what you are doing is a core competency of the company there is no hope that you will be anything other than maginilized.
Incorrect, or at least incomplete information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Hard to say anything from a single case. She may indeed have caught it the same way as her brother. I saw in another article that she hadn't started Tamiflu until after she was already ill, when it's not expected to work as well.
It impacts manufacturing costs, but in an interesting way. If you are NASA or General Dynamics, it would be a little bit cheaper to make, but no big deal. The interesting bit is that you should be able to make a decent nozzle with 1/10th the manufacturing/machining capability. It reduces the costs of entry, probably down to the level of a NASCAR crew's machine shop.
So, not truly revolutionary, but "disruptive" tech in the sense that it puts the ability to make decent nozzles in the hands of many many more people.
Yes, it's a bad analogy. A better one that I've been using for ~15 years is an office building. Doors in an office building are there to be opened. If you have a door to your private office that opens on a public hallway -- lock it or expect that people will walk in from time to time. Some kid walking the halls and twisting doorknobs is not trespassing, stealing, or anything else except maybe being a pain in the butt. Even if you put a little "private" sign on the door you should expect people to open it from time to time and they are still not trespassing or stealing.
Similarly, network services are there with the expectation of being used. If you don't want them used, the burden is on you to restrict them. If you don't you have no grounds to complain.
As an aside, I think law enforcement hates the idea of this for the same reason they hate all forms of anonymity - it gives plausible deniability that some particular person comitted some particular crime.
They are saying that it traces back to whoever had the "object of promoting". In your example you may only be liable if they determine that the original creators of Grokster had that object.
It's a really vague clause - they will have to rehear this some time in the future on some other case and issue clearer guidance
"According to these rumors, Microsoft recognized that Win3.1 was the most pirated piece of software ever"
Actually, it wasn't. DOS was more pirated. But both of them came bundled with some PCs (lawfully, even more unlawfully of course). I saw the stats from the SPA on a regular basis back then. The usual #1 was QEMM386. It didn't come bundled with PCs, but without it a 386 or 486 was just a faster 286. Many people didn't even know they had it, since it was unlawfully installed by many/most/all screwdriver shops.
The point is valid though. I dealt with lots of large corporate accounts. That where the $$ was. Virtually every one of those accounts started with an in house nerd and a pirate QEMM on his home PC. He'd come in to work and after loading a boat anchor like a Banyan network stack there was almost no way he could launch WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3.
-1 creepy - Ayanami Rei handle
+2 nerdy - Utena sig
"Our local "Cinema Saver" (that is the actual name they operate under) gets all the new releases about two or three weeks after they hit the mainstream theaters."
Most of these get the print they run from a 1st run house that has had it in heavy rotation for those 2-3 weeks. They range from slightly scratched to almost unwatchable. Add to that the typically poorly set up projectors, poor sound systems, etc and you no longer have a reason to see LOTR in all its glory and may as well wait for the DVD.
Fascinating.. but fairly off topic. A 25% chance isn't that large. Large cross-cultural studies of blood types and other markers show that about 10% of all children globally don't have the father that the birth cert (or whatever) says thay have. 25% seems reasonable in the hunting/gathering communities that seem to have shaped a lot of our behavior patterns. Those hunting parties are sometimes gone a long long time and that effeminate geek that stays behind designing a better arrow point may not be as gay as he looks.
The clan certainly benefits from a smallish percentage of "uncles" that don't provide for their children, but rather for the nieces/nephews or the clan at large (still mostly relatives).
There isn't the same benefit for lesbians though. They certainly know that their children are theirs. Seems to me that game theory would predict gay men but only bisexual women. A good bonding behavior for when the men are away hunting, but guanteed 50% progeny is too good a bet to select for completely gay women. I'm sure there is a dissertation in there for someone...though you'd need to fing the right grad advisor.
obOnTopic and in the desire for full disclosure, the author of this article holds long positions in GERN and STEM. Go Stemcells! Go Telomerase!
I agree, you would think that if there were a "gay gene" that it would have been removed from natural selection.
Nope. The ringer is when you can't be certain of paternitiy. For a male, it's when the chances that the child of your mate are less than 4:1 in favor of you being the father. If there is a 1 in 4 chance that your child is not really your child, your genes have a better chance of propogating by supporting the children of your sister than by supporting the children that may be yours.
The society/clan benefits from having a certain percentage of males that concentrate on the nieces/nephews rather than the son/daughter. The clan also benefits from a certain percentage that knows at a fairly early age that they will not need to plan to suport a child. It's a lot easier, even now, to plan a career as an artist, actor, musician, write, etc. if you are fairly certain that you will not be getting married and having kids.
So? Gold is useful, but that doesn't make it valuable. Water is even more valuable, but does not command the price point of gold. In the actual event of a "Vingian" sigularity, even semi-mature nanotech can extract gold from seawater and wipe out the value of gold reserves. Demand/supply = value. The only thing you can buy now that would hold any value is land - they ain't making any more of it. you can build gomi islands in the sea and you can grab land on other platets, but it's not the same value as good old terran continental land mass.