I started programming in HS with Pascal. I loved it! It hooked me on programming for life. Java followed in college and other languages have sort of layered up on that. But I would consider those two to be the basis for my interest.
This is sort of cool. It's kind of like an impressionist model. I'm not exactly sure why the applet seems like it's interpreting and processing all the data locally though... Kind of slow. I could imagine this sort of thing being handy for quick pre-vis stuff I do all the time at my architecture job. That is if it looked sharper. Right now it's a bit amorphous.
My experience with new construction over the last several years in urban areas and on institutional campuses is that new buildings almost always have fiber as part of the expected utilities package. This maybe not be considered as public infrastructure but it is certainly considered as a required infrastructure by developers, engineers, and architects. I think over the next 30 years (typical building lifespan) we will probably see a proliferation of fiber in urban areas. Rural areas are a different question altogether however.
Exactly, as a "young worker" myself I have to say companies don't show a great deal of loyalty to us either. My firm flat out refuses to assist with any continuing education costs whatsoever. In my last review I didn't ask for a higher salary I asked for help in covering those costs. I was told they couldn't do it because it set a precedent for other employees. Considering in my profession we are required to participate in a industry wide internship development program (which costs several hundred dollars a year) that seems not only short-sighted but also mean spirited. Most of my bosses still have this notion of what being a young architect means. That includes working extremely long hours slaving over a drafting table late into the night. However, with CAD systems today we can can do the same work in a fraction of the time. So many starting architects no longer have to work those crazy long hours to be twice as productive as their predecessors. I often get a sense of resentment about that from most older employees I work with. At the end of the day I think most younger workers would show more loyalty if companies showed more interest in developing our careers. You can hardly expect anyone to stay with a company that treats them like a disposable plugin worker.
Also, blatantly ignoring younger workers because they are young is simply stupid. I have introduced several changes at my firm with regards to software and technology practices which have resulted in a complete change in our design process. Despite the success of all my initiatives and the good reputation I have developed it is still extremely difficult to get the firm to spend money on anything which is a departure from our traditional process. This has a lot to do with people at the intermediate levels of the company. I have found it politically expedient to go to one person with ideas and let them carry them forward and claim credit. In upper management it is just seen as unwise to implement changes suggested by a junior employee no matter what that employee's track record might be. I find this whole attitude insulting. If I thought I might be treated differently elsewhere I would move for that reason alone.
My jailbroken phone literally stopped working. Performance definitely suffered and the extra apps were not worth the trouble. At this point I'm more than willing to patiently wait and only use Apple vetted apps through the app store. Besides, I don't think it will take very long for whatever authentication method to be broken that Apple is using to prevent SDK apps not purchased through the store to run on the phone.
It would be more exciting if Sun was porting Flash...
If you were really interested in getting information about the layout of military installations there are probably more effective ways of getting that info. Using a little bit of social engineering one could easily exploit a great resource in the families of servicemembers or civilian staff who serve on those bases. Those people are less likely to realize what they are revealing and typically have fairly decent access to corners of the base or just daily operations info that you probably wouldn't expect. For instance while living overseas as a kid I could have given you a fairly good count and description of the air traffic and deployed aircraft at the base I lived at. Being that I was fascinated by the aircraft I could easily distinguish between the various configurations of the F-111 that flew in and out of the base and give you a count of the number of A-10 and AC-131 aircraft at the base. While a boy scout I regularly camped on military installations and training grounds and could give you information relevant to short range missile deployment before the end of the cold war. I played soccer literally next to one of the central communications monitoring facilities in Germany for years (we all knew it was there even though no one talked about it). In fact if we kicked our ball over the fence onto what was otherwise just a big pile of rocks an MP would come around the corner a few minutes later and throw it back to us. I remember going to the movie rental place across the parking lot from a large doppler radar installation at another base down the road. I could have easily described the layout of numerous military installations in middle school. By the time I was in high school and traveling for sports I had been to a number of overseas installations across europe. It's probably why every other commercial on the Armed Forces Network is about OPSEC (operations security).
Basically, I don't think people who care (Chinese People's Liberation Army) honestly need Google (they have keyloggers installed at the pentagon after all right?). Sometimes we tend to focus on the obvious for us, when a real intelligence professional would probably just view something like that as a bonus to their more effective and reliable means of collecting intelligence.
I'm lucky I guess. I grew up overseas and didn't really have a chance to watch most of the sci-fi that was on in the 90s. So right now I'm catching up on Star Trek DS-9 (season 5 at the moment). Next I plan on watching Babylon 5. All this for the first time. A few years ago I spent about two years watching all the seasons of Stargate that I missed. Netflix is really all I need at this point. I would highly recommend it to most people by the way. If possible you should go to your nearest "Time-o-mat" and jump back to the early nineties. Give your previous self a PSP or something to distract yourself from watching all those good shows. Easy as pie, now you have loads of good content to entertain yourself with.
Sadly, I fear currently this strategy will not serve you well in 10 year's time as today's content mill is a bit worn down. It appears that all the old content templates have been overused and now all seem to simply resemble each other. The side-effect being a large number of shows which are mostly indistinguishable (CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI Cabo-Spring Break, etc...). I would recommend to your future self some good gems in the mix however, largely in the comedy genre.
I would be happy to install filtering software on my PC for say the bargain price of free RIAA registered label's music for life. This goes for movies and television programming as well. You want me to pay to access your property... well you can pay to access mine (if only the world worked this way).
I live in the Washington DC area and FIOS is officially available in my area. It's more of a building to building affair though. The building across the street (new) has it. My building (old) does not.
I would love to switch; just not to DSL. So for now, Comcast it is.
I grew up in a family with no TV until I was about 12 years old. Losing touch with a focal point of popular culture and the related detrimental social side-effects is definitely a valid point. Trust me, by the time they are 6 or 7 they will probably find a friend with a good movie collection and find an excuse to go over to their house often enough. I know I did.
The boss hardly has to account for overtime in his budget if the end result of having his employees working overtime is that he pays them what he has always paid them. At the end of the day it sounds like people make less and IBM saves money. They just negotiated a far more efficient means of extracting more work from their employees for a one time (settlement) cost. It's hard to say without seeing all the figures at hand but anytime you negotiate a wage contract having to work more to make the same is considered losing the negotiation.
I would rather be assured of a decent salary along with the guarantee that I would be working a lot of unpaid, if sporadic, overtime (I'm and architect and that is exactly the position I am in) rather than making a meager salary and hoping for lots of overtime every week to make ends meet.
In just the last few months Verizon seems to be making an about face in a number of ways. I quit the service after they threw hundreds of dollars worth of extra fees at me in the final two months of my contract (that's a good way to keep a customer at the end of their contract). I had called previously to point out the extra fees and got a bit of a run around. After calling to terminate my service however they simply wiped my last month's bill, extra charges (which I never paid), and even sent me 8$ in the mail about 4 months later. Essentially a customer rep had modified my contract removing a messenging service which Verizon no longer offered (but I still had as part of an ancient contract). I had turned down overtures to "upgrade" to much more expensive options. The rep simply dropped the messenging plan on all but the primary line of my family plan (hello huge surcharges).
At the end of the day, I used Verizon because they had better coverage in the areas I've lived the last few years. After pulling a fast one on me, I didn't feel it was worth it anymore so I switched. They way the resolved the problem without much fuss though made me think better of them. With an open network they might even be more attractive than any other options now. That is, once I finish my current NEW contract.
I would have to say Comcast just climbed to the #1 slot on my evil telecom company board.
I know isn't directly related but what about backup software?
I use Acronis Trueimage (On xp, mostly for the compressed backups, incremental backups, and image cloning abilities). It seems solid but I kind of went with the quickest cheapest solution to my problem. It has seriously saved me several times already in one year. I just made a backup and just had the drive fail. I can upgrade to a roomier drive and just restore the files from the old drive now (something I just did with a new drive and my installation volume last week, minus the drive failure).
Actually architects are NOT paid very much for the work they do given the scope of responsibilities and liability they often undertake in the building process. An architect's fee almost always covers the fees of all the sub-contractors which includes everything from building systems engineers (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structural) to consultants for LEED (green building accreditation, a must for university work). Factor in general overhead costs which include printing (architects print piles of drawings every day), IT (think tons of data produced and backed up on a regular basis), software costs (Gehry's firm develops their own software inhouse in addition to using commercial stuff), high end hardware (yeah... architects do a ton of rendering and animation work), and all the other regular business expenses. Toss the cost of liability insurance for exactly this kind of thing on top of that big pile of money and you would probably see a fairly thin line of profitability for architects.
Most architects who make good money make it through the developer process (i.g. Design Build) which doesn't apply with University work.
No one needs to talk on a cell phone in a movie theater. If someone is choking on their popcorn or having a heart attack from the popcorn butter make a fuss and someone on staff will help and call an ambulance.
Same goes for:
1.) restaurants
2.) libraries
3.) staffed computer labs / classrooms (high school campuses for example)
4.) the conference room at work
5.) a museum
6.) at church
etc... etc...
When you are in public, in a staffed location, where there is almost 100% likelihood of there being a wired phone available there's simply no reason for you to NEED your cellphone to work other than that you simply can't stop checking your damn email on your blackberry. I have no pity for your loss in those situations. If people can't bring themselves to behave in a courteous and respectful manner then sometimes you have to force them. This is why in society we have moral and legal constructs which define the limitations of acceptable behavior. Because otherwise it seems like the majority of people do what they please.
If you want to eat dinner in a restaurant that I own, making it a private establishment, I have every right to post a sign letting you know your cell phone will not work. If you don't want to eat there, find somewhere else. I seriously doubt business will suffer.
I think it's funny how a decade ago we all got along just fine without cell phones and today they're so indispensable we can't block the signal in movie theaters for "safety" reasons.
I used to work mac phone support at a private university. At least amongst the student user population X% is definitely a two digit number (also, not a small two digit number). Even if this is only a first person infection enough people (we'll call them unsophisticated users) eager to view a video would just install what they are told to to get things to work. I think we forget that most people have this perspective when it comes to computer use. They just want it to work so they will take the easiest path.
I've got the setting but after turning it on I am unable to connect to the server. SO... it appears you have to wait a bit to get it going. I don't remember having the same issues when they added POP.
Actually, it's probably a good idea to try and improve building efficiencies as much as possible. Parking on a residential floor is a costly use of square footage. In addition to a large lift you have to provide several hundred square feet for each parking spot. That could easily add up to the same square footage as several units. Which means in financial terms you aren't realizing potential revenue and in terms of efficient use of the building footprint you're not providing the same number of units for people to live in. Considering the costs and potential pollution that goes into constructing a building, not using the footprint efficiently is a decidedly "un-green" thing to do. There's a real reason why urban buildings are very different from suburban ones.
I would imagine that a more likely driving factor in this case was the site's adjacency to the water. I don't work in NYC so I don't know the geotechnical specifics of Manhatten, but if it's silty soil you're going to have a lot of water penetration which means pumps running 24/7 and limitations on how deep you can go. I would imagine the developer simply saw this issue as a justification for doing something as exorbitant and unique as having people park on their floor. More of a marketing gimmick that anything else. A green building has bike storage, public lockers and showers, and is normally situated to make using public transportation easy and practical.
Yarr,
I just did this. Verizon's reception is better, but the iPhone is slick and the AT&T bills are really quite good. I can finally split the bill with my brother (family plan) in a way that makes sense for both of us because we both get an itemized bill for our number. Just no talking in the elevator or parking garage of my building anymore.
When I first read about this I though "finally, someone got a jury trial." Then I read about the circumstances and the defense's strategy and immediately realized this was a cut and dry case. She clearly broke the law and didn't take the settlement offered. I personally think she deserves the penalty. If not for her blatant disregard for the law, than at least for setting such a terrible precedent that the RIAA can now use as a bat to beat over other defendants in other court cases.
I think the Germans had the first jet engine (at least the first one to be used in flight, Hans von Ohain). Damn Germans are always second to the party but so efficient they're always first out the door.
Sounds like you Brits will have to find something else for us to give back. Maybe disc brakes or the steam engine? Personally, I think you've done enough with taking Madonna off our hands.
Of course doctors are making less money! There's only so much money in a system at any one point. At the moment the insurance companies have figured out how to make it all roll downhill in their direction. So while doctors used to make a lot, now insurance companies are cutting into everyone else's profits to pad their own. It's one of the whole "gut the system and screw the consequences" examples of modern golden-parachute CEO-ism prevalent in our current corporate culture.
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I started programming in HS with Pascal. I loved it! It hooked me on programming for life. Java followed in college and other languages have sort of layered up on that. But I would consider those two to be the basis for my interest.
Just last night I sent a friend a direct link to a band on Amazon. She replied "oh cool, I'll go get this on iTunes."
This is sort of cool. It's kind of like an impressionist model. I'm not exactly sure why the applet seems like it's interpreting and processing all the data locally though... Kind of slow. I could imagine this sort of thing being handy for quick pre-vis stuff I do all the time at my architecture job. That is if it looked sharper. Right now it's a bit amorphous.
That's probably a pretty important distinction (age). I would guess about half of the people who vote for Idol are 13 year old girls anyway.
My experience with new construction over the last several years in urban areas and on institutional campuses is that new buildings almost always have fiber as part of the expected utilities package. This maybe not be considered as public infrastructure but it is certainly considered as a required infrastructure by developers, engineers, and architects. I think over the next 30 years (typical building lifespan) we will probably see a proliferation of fiber in urban areas. Rural areas are a different question altogether however.
Exactly, as a "young worker" myself I have to say companies don't show a great deal of loyalty to us either. My firm flat out refuses to assist with any continuing education costs whatsoever. In my last review I didn't ask for a higher salary I asked for help in covering those costs. I was told they couldn't do it because it set a precedent for other employees. Considering in my profession we are required to participate in a industry wide internship development program (which costs several hundred dollars a year) that seems not only short-sighted but also mean spirited. Most of my bosses still have this notion of what being a young architect means. That includes working extremely long hours slaving over a drafting table late into the night. However, with CAD systems today we can can do the same work in a fraction of the time. So many starting architects no longer have to work those crazy long hours to be twice as productive as their predecessors. I often get a sense of resentment about that from most older employees I work with. At the end of the day I think most younger workers would show more loyalty if companies showed more interest in developing our careers. You can hardly expect anyone to stay with a company that treats them like a disposable plugin worker.
Also, blatantly ignoring younger workers because they are young is simply stupid. I have introduced several changes at my firm with regards to software and technology practices which have resulted in a complete change in our design process. Despite the success of all my initiatives and the good reputation I have developed it is still extremely difficult to get the firm to spend money on anything which is a departure from our traditional process. This has a lot to do with people at the intermediate levels of the company. I have found it politically expedient to go to one person with ideas and let them carry them forward and claim credit. In upper management it is just seen as unwise to implement changes suggested by a junior employee no matter what that employee's track record might be. I find this whole attitude insulting. If I thought I might be treated differently elsewhere I would move for that reason alone.
My jailbroken phone literally stopped working. Performance definitely suffered and the extra apps were not worth the trouble. At this point I'm more than willing to patiently wait and only use Apple vetted apps through the app store. Besides, I don't think it will take very long for whatever authentication method to be broken that Apple is using to prevent SDK apps not purchased through the store to run on the phone.
It would be more exciting if Sun was porting Flash...
If you were really interested in getting information about the layout of military installations there are probably more effective ways of getting that info. Using a little bit of social engineering one could easily exploit a great resource in the families of servicemembers or civilian staff who serve on those bases. Those people are less likely to realize what they are revealing and typically have fairly decent access to corners of the base or just daily operations info that you probably wouldn't expect. For instance while living overseas as a kid I could have given you a fairly good count and description of the air traffic and deployed aircraft at the base I lived at. Being that I was fascinated by the aircraft I could easily distinguish between the various configurations of the F-111 that flew in and out of the base and give you a count of the number of A-10 and AC-131 aircraft at the base. While a boy scout I regularly camped on military installations and training grounds and could give you information relevant to short range missile deployment before the end of the cold war. I played soccer literally next to one of the central communications monitoring facilities in Germany for years (we all knew it was there even though no one talked about it). In fact if we kicked our ball over the fence onto what was otherwise just a big pile of rocks an MP would come around the corner a few minutes later and throw it back to us. I remember going to the movie rental place across the parking lot from a large doppler radar installation at another base down the road. I could have easily described the layout of numerous military installations in middle school. By the time I was in high school and traveling for sports I had been to a number of overseas installations across europe. It's probably why every other commercial on the Armed Forces Network is about OPSEC (operations security).
Basically, I don't think people who care (Chinese People's Liberation Army) honestly need Google (they have keyloggers installed at the pentagon after all right?). Sometimes we tend to focus on the obvious for us, when a real intelligence professional would probably just view something like that as a bonus to their more effective and reliable means of collecting intelligence.
I'm lucky I guess. I grew up overseas and didn't really have a chance to watch most of the sci-fi that was on in the 90s. So right now I'm catching up on Star Trek DS-9 (season 5 at the moment). Next I plan on watching Babylon 5. All this for the first time. A few years ago I spent about two years watching all the seasons of Stargate that I missed. Netflix is really all I need at this point. I would highly recommend it to most people by the way. If possible you should go to your nearest "Time-o-mat" and jump back to the early nineties. Give your previous self a PSP or something to distract yourself from watching all those good shows. Easy as pie, now you have loads of good content to entertain yourself with.
Sadly, I fear currently this strategy will not serve you well in 10 year's time as today's content mill is a bit worn down. It appears that all the old content templates have been overused and now all seem to simply resemble each other. The side-effect being a large number of shows which are mostly indistinguishable (CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI Cabo-Spring Break, etc...). I would recommend to your future self some good gems in the mix however, largely in the comedy genre.
I would be happy to install filtering software on my PC for say the bargain price of free RIAA registered label's music for life. This goes for movies and television programming as well. You want me to pay to access your property... well you can pay to access mine (if only the world worked this way).
I live in the Washington DC area and FIOS is officially available in my area. It's more of a building to building affair though. The building across the street (new) has it. My building (old) does not.
I would love to switch; just not to DSL. So for now, Comcast it is.
I grew up in a family with no TV until I was about 12 years old. Losing touch with a focal point of popular culture and the related detrimental social side-effects is definitely a valid point. Trust me, by the time they are 6 or 7 they will probably find a friend with a good movie collection and find an excuse to go over to their house often enough. I know I did.
The boss hardly has to account for overtime in his budget if the end result of having his employees working overtime is that he pays them what he has always paid them. At the end of the day it sounds like people make less and IBM saves money. They just negotiated a far more efficient means of extracting more work from their employees for a one time (settlement) cost. It's hard to say without seeing all the figures at hand but anytime you negotiate a wage contract having to work more to make the same is considered losing the negotiation.
I would rather be assured of a decent salary along with the guarantee that I would be working a lot of unpaid, if sporadic, overtime (I'm and architect and that is exactly the position I am in) rather than making a meager salary and hoping for lots of overtime every week to make ends meet.
In just the last few months Verizon seems to be making an about face in a number of ways. I quit the service after they threw hundreds of dollars worth of extra fees at me in the final two months of my contract (that's a good way to keep a customer at the end of their contract). I had called previously to point out the extra fees and got a bit of a run around. After calling to terminate my service however they simply wiped my last month's bill, extra charges (which I never paid), and even sent me 8$ in the mail about 4 months later. Essentially a customer rep had modified my contract removing a messenging service which Verizon no longer offered (but I still had as part of an ancient contract). I had turned down overtures to "upgrade" to much more expensive options. The rep simply dropped the messenging plan on all but the primary line of my family plan (hello huge surcharges).
At the end of the day, I used Verizon because they had better coverage in the areas I've lived the last few years. After pulling a fast one on me, I didn't feel it was worth it anymore so I switched. They way the resolved the problem without much fuss though made me think better of them. With an open network they might even be more attractive than any other options now. That is, once I finish my current NEW contract.
I would have to say Comcast just climbed to the #1 slot on my evil telecom company board.
I know isn't directly related but what about backup software?
I use Acronis Trueimage (On xp, mostly for the compressed backups, incremental backups, and image cloning abilities). It seems solid but I kind of went with the quickest cheapest solution to my problem. It has seriously saved me several times already in one year. I just made a backup and just had the drive fail. I can upgrade to a roomier drive and just restore the files from the old drive now (something I just did with a new drive and my installation volume last week, minus the drive failure).
Actually architects are NOT paid very much for the work they do given the scope of responsibilities and liability they often undertake in the building process. An architect's fee almost always covers the fees of all the sub-contractors which includes everything from building systems engineers (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structural) to consultants for LEED (green building accreditation, a must for university work). Factor in general overhead costs which include printing (architects print piles of drawings every day), IT (think tons of data produced and backed up on a regular basis), software costs (Gehry's firm develops their own software inhouse in addition to using commercial stuff), high end hardware (yeah... architects do a ton of rendering and animation work), and all the other regular business expenses. Toss the cost of liability insurance for exactly this kind of thing on top of that big pile of money and you would probably see a fairly thin line of profitability for architects.
Most architects who make good money make it through the developer process (i.g. Design Build) which doesn't apply with University work.
No one needs to talk on a cell phone in a movie theater. If someone is choking on their popcorn or having a heart attack from the popcorn butter make a fuss and someone on staff will help and call an ambulance.
Same goes for:
1.) restaurants
2.) libraries
3.) staffed computer labs / classrooms (high school campuses for example)
4.) the conference room at work
5.) a museum
6.) at church
etc... etc...
When you are in public, in a staffed location, where there is almost 100% likelihood of there being a wired phone available there's simply no reason for you to NEED your cellphone to work other than that you simply can't stop checking your damn email on your blackberry. I have no pity for your loss in those situations. If people can't bring themselves to behave in a courteous and respectful manner then sometimes you have to force them. This is why in society we have moral and legal constructs which define the limitations of acceptable behavior. Because otherwise it seems like the majority of people do what they please.
If you want to eat dinner in a restaurant that I own, making it a private establishment, I have every right to post a sign letting you know your cell phone will not work. If you don't want to eat there, find somewhere else. I seriously doubt business will suffer.
I think it's funny how a decade ago we all got along just fine without cell phones and today they're so indispensable we can't block the signal in movie theaters for "safety" reasons.
I used to work mac phone support at a private university. At least amongst the student user population X% is definitely a two digit number (also, not a small two digit number). Even if this is only a first person infection enough people (we'll call them unsophisticated users) eager to view a video would just install what they are told to to get things to work. I think we forget that most people have this perspective when it comes to computer use. They just want it to work so they will take the easiest path.
I've got the setting but after turning it on I am unable to connect to the server. SO... it appears you have to wait a bit to get it going. I don't remember having the same issues when they added POP.
Does anyone else think e-Paper loses a lot of its cool factor when you see the gigantic boxes always attached to them?
Tire Salesman: "Yes, here's my sexy svelte e-Paper"
Englishman: "Oy! What's the gigantic black box attached to it?"
Tire Salesman: "Oh that, that's the... umm... e-Paper-Printer it is!"
Actually, it's probably a good idea to try and improve building efficiencies as much as possible. Parking on a residential floor is a costly use of square footage. In addition to a large lift you have to provide several hundred square feet for each parking spot. That could easily add up to the same square footage as several units. Which means in financial terms you aren't realizing potential revenue and in terms of efficient use of the building footprint you're not providing the same number of units for people to live in. Considering the costs and potential pollution that goes into constructing a building, not using the footprint efficiently is a decidedly "un-green" thing to do. There's a real reason why urban buildings are very different from suburban ones.
I would imagine that a more likely driving factor in this case was the site's adjacency to the water. I don't work in NYC so I don't know the geotechnical specifics of Manhatten, but if it's silty soil you're going to have a lot of water penetration which means pumps running 24/7 and limitations on how deep you can go. I would imagine the developer simply saw this issue as a justification for doing something as exorbitant and unique as having people park on their floor. More of a marketing gimmick that anything else. A green building has bike storage, public lockers and showers, and is normally situated to make using public transportation easy and practical.
Yarr, I just did this. Verizon's reception is better, but the iPhone is slick and the AT&T bills are really quite good. I can finally split the bill with my brother (family plan) in a way that makes sense for both of us because we both get an itemized bill for our number. Just no talking in the elevator or parking garage of my building anymore.
When I first read about this I though "finally, someone got a jury trial." Then I read about the circumstances and the defense's strategy and immediately realized this was a cut and dry case. She clearly broke the law and didn't take the settlement offered. I personally think she deserves the penalty. If not for her blatant disregard for the law, than at least for setting such a terrible precedent that the RIAA can now use as a bat to beat over other defendants in other court cases.
I think the Germans had the first jet engine (at least the first one to be used in flight, Hans von Ohain). Damn Germans are always second to the party but so efficient they're always first out the door.
Sounds like you Brits will have to find something else for us to give back. Maybe disc brakes or the steam engine? Personally, I think you've done enough with taking Madonna off our hands.
Of course doctors are making less money! There's only so much money in a system at any one point. At the moment the insurance companies have figured out how to make it all roll downhill in their direction. So while doctors used to make a lot, now insurance companies are cutting into everyone else's profits to pad their own. It's one of the whole "gut the system and screw the consequences" examples of modern golden-parachute CEO-ism prevalent in our current corporate culture.
At least that's my completely uninformed opinion.