What If Tim Berners-Lee Had Patented the Web? 154
An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot had the story that the web had turned 20 years old. Of course, patents also last 20 years, which has resulted in some asking what would have happened if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the web? Thankfully, he didn't (and wouldn't). But we'd be living in a very different (and probably less interesting) world if he had."
Re:And queue up the... (Score:4, Insightful)
A few comments about those statistics.
First, "children born to unwed mothers" does not necessarily mean children raised by a single mother and no father, it just means children born to mothers who aren't yet married. In some times and places in the past (and even to a degree today in some places, even in the US), having a child out of wedlock could get you shunned, maybe even arrested, banished or executed. Sometimes it would all fall on the mother, sometimes on the mother and father, sometimes mostly on the father (pretty rare, of course). At some times, it was vitally important for the couple to marry the moment pregnancy was suspected, to conceal the fact that the child had been conceived out of wedlock. At other times, it was enough to marry some time before the birth so that the child wouldn't be born a "bastard". In the social context we're working in for the purpose of this discussion, there isn't really such a thing as a "bastard" or "illegitimate" child anymore. Sure, the word bastard still means what it means, but the connotations aren't what they once were. It's no longer necessary for a couple to marry to "legitimize" their children. For one thing, with the family court system and DNA testing, women aren't dependent on the father to make a public declaration of responsibility in the form of a marriage. For another, the social stigma of being a bastard has been reduced. So, when a couple who are not married are expecting a baby, far fewer of them feel the need to run out and get married right away to protect themselves and their child from scorn.
To make a long story short (too late), your "children born to unwed mothers" statistic doesn't tell us if that extra 13% isn't just couples who don't feel the need to rush into marriage anymore, but still stay together to raise the child. For that matter, it doesn't give us divorce statistics on the 72% who were married in 1990 vs the 59% in 2008. All it tells us is what percent of children were born to to mothers who weren't married in two different years, not what percentage of children were raised only by their mothers.
Secondly, your statistic from the Village Voice about "children brought up in single mother homes" (assuming that's what it actually says, since that part is paraphrased) tells us about statistics for children brought up in single mother homes, but doesn't differentiate between homes where the mother is single by choice and those where the mother is not. For that matter, it doesn't make any effort to account for the fact that single mother families are far more likely to also be low-income or poverty-stricken and to adjust for the typical increase in all sorts of crime statistics among lower income brackets.
In other words, the idea that fictional characters deciding to raise their children alone leads to social problems is not supported at all by the statistics you quote.