"If capitalism is so great, how come 3/4 of the world's population live in poverty?" -- because they have never experienced capitalism, and they have hopelessly corrupt governments. India, for example, had a mismanaged socialist economy for decades which was hopelessly inefficient and corrupt. Technically speaking, there is not one single capitalist country in the world. Corporatism maybe. Mercantilism maybe. But not capitalism. I wouldn't even call capitalism a political structure - it's just the freedom with which people trade values with one another. Governments are something else entirely and usually conspire to oppress this fundamental desire that humans have to trade with one another on their own terms. 
 
At the heart of it all is human self interest. You will never, ever repress self interest without some form of physical coercion (i.e. violence) or brainwashing (a la every communist regime in history). In the end though, we are bound by two inescapable things - the fact that we are individuals who must apply effort in order to keep ourselves alive (i.e. self interest), and that we have a genetic bond with our families which, for the most part, motivates people to help those with which they share genes more than it motivates them to help complete strangers. No amount of social engineering will ever change this. The net result is that people want to be free to live their own lives and set their own goals and priorities. When people are free to do this, free trade ensues. 

Wow. I never thought this thread would go in this direction!!

At least dubdesciple's comment was good. It's nice to know people still can think for themselves and not just repeat what they hear on fauxe (fox) news. Actually, all news is controlled, MSNBC included. The ignorance of those who don't know that those 3/4 of the poor were made poor because of capitalism. In fact before capitalism, they only had to worry about droughts and other natural disasters and not thieves coming in and stealing their resources.
 
What do you call the problem with illegal children coming from South America? Blowback. I know blowback usually means terrorists attacks like 9/11 but those countries are poor because of the US.
 
So Sharke, do you think Ronald Reagain was a great president?  Did you know he funded an army that went village to village and killed, raped, tortured and swung young children, by their feet, so their heads would break open on the rocks? They thought it brought them good luck to collect their broken skulls. A day in the life of a Reagan supported army. Go in a village, kill the men, rape the women, break for lunch, kill the old people then crack some children's skulls. Isn't capitalism a great thing! What do you think the weapons were for during the Iran contras hearings? That's what the right does, kill the left and say that they are the evil. It's all there in history but not what's taught in history. So please know what your talking about. You do realize you contradict yourself when you say your bond with your family. I can think of nothing more socialist than that. BTW - There has NEVER been a communist "regime", ever. There has only been totalitarian and dictators. Again, BTW - The us put more dictators in charge, by force, than any other nation, EVER!
 
I'm glad you understand what brainwashing is. It's to bad you don't know who's brainwashed.  

I think at this point you're just reeling off a confused series of shopworn political slogans. "Faux News"..."Reagan"...etc etc. None of which have anything to do with the subject at hand. I also fail to see what the military has to do with capitalism. It sounds like you're a lot more interested in politics than philosophy or economics. Do I think Reagan was a great president? What does that have to do with anything? I might as well as you if you think Ellen is a good TV host. 

Hey guys. We should probably backtrack before we end up up in a pointless ideology namecalling session lol. I enjoyed hearing each point of view, but I know the deeper we go the closer we get to violating TOS if we have not already. It is interesting how people of different political/economic leanings react to this topic.

Heh you're probably right...

You say, what does the military have to do with capitalism? I say, wake up. There has never been a war that was not over resources. Iraq, oil. Afghanistan, natural gas and other untapped resources. The only problem there is they actually keep fighting back and we can't extract them. If you believe war is about defending freedom, your a fool.
 
You brought it off topic. I merely speculated as to why subscription services will come about and my thought about it because of capitalism. You brought up all the other stuff. I only mentioned fauxe news and Reagan because all the brainwashed people love them, plain and simple.
 
Interesting where you combine politics and philosophy. They are separate, the same and interchangeable. I would not expect you to understand but can you come up with anything that hasn't already been a "political slogan" for the right? I gave some examples that you don't hear about. Can you?
 
You don't have to answer because I won't respond to you anymore. I won't continue to ague facts with your, whatever.....

Okay it's a rant, but please read the whole thing if you're going to comment on it.
 
Before this thread goes COMPLETELY off the rails and turns political, those with long memories will recall that about a year ago I asked what people thought about subscriptions. At the time, I did so because I was against the concept due to Adobe's implementation, and thought maybe I was missing something. Despite some positive points I hadn't considered, by and large the posts here validated my opinion.
 
Gibson uses Adobe and does the subscription thing, and after experiencing it for the past year, I have now come to a somewhat different conclusion. All the subscription models so far have been geared to large companies like Gibson and in that case, it works and saves money overall. Everyone on every continent is on the same version of everything, all the time. I needed to use Indesign while working on a manual. There were no incompatibility issues, no registration, no updating...it was super-easy. BUT...
 
That's the good news. The bad news is that AFAIK no company has created a subscription model for programs that are used primarily by individuals and small businesses. The idea of not being able to keep what you buy is insane. For example (and not to pick on another company) if you're happy with Sonar X1, then why should you have to be running X3 and paying for it every month if you want to be able to open the projects you created in X1?!? That makes absolutely zero sense to me.
 
The points about smoothing out cash flow over the year does make sense, and that does allow a company more latitude in their planning. And yes, they do need to stay in business and I don't begrudge a company that. During one of my anti-subscription rants I was also told by a couple developers that releasing a program in smaller chunks improves stability and simplifies QA rather than trying to make a massive set of changes all at once. That I do see as an advantage. They also pointed out that features often "sit on a shelf," completed, waiting for an update and a subscription model would allow them to be released sooner. I think that's also valid.
 
Subscription models CAN work; look at magazines, Netflix, XM, etc. But if you stop subscribing to a magazine, your back issues don't vanish into thin air and if you stop subscribing to Netflix, they don't erase your memory of the movies you saw. In terms of individual software users, I don't think a subscription model is going to work until a company comes at it from a completely different perspective. I get the impression that subscription models are generally based on what a company thinks will benefit it the most. I believe that if someone devised a subscription model based on what will benefit customers the most, those customers would flock to it and make the company more successful anyway. I tend to doubt that's the approach Avid will take, but I'm keeping an open mind.
 
 

Just because something has to do with resources does not mean it's capitalism. You have done this before Guitarpima. The most innocuous of subjects turns into some kind of bizarre, confused anticapitalist rant. Which is funny, because it's clear you don't even seem to know what the word means and what it doesn't mean. Shoehorning Faux News and Reagan into a thread which has nothing whatsoever to do with them is another symptom of the same thing. "Because the brainwashed people love them"? Oh my....
 
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted....

I just noticed the other day that AT&T has some kind of subscription-like model available now too. For a certain fee per month, you are automatically entitled to a "free" phone upgrade every year or so. I'm in two minds whether to go for it or not, because on the one hand it kills my sad tech-addicted soul when an awesome new phone gets released and I know I still have another 12 months left before I'm entitled to a new one at the upgrade price, but on the other hand I have yet to do the math and work out if it's good value. But at least they're not forcing customers into this model, it's just another option. And I have no problem with that.