I can't believe this crap still gets modded up. Just goes to show how mods only know what they hear on Slashdot. LCDs are *just fucking fine* for what most people, including professionals, do with Photoshop.
Most people, but not artists. Perhaps I assume too much, but I assume they teach art at this art college.
Design, layout, compositing--so little requires knowing *exactly* how it the colors will look when printed.
Like I said, basic functionality. As opposed to anything where you need to know the color you're using.
When I started using Photoshop here ten years ago, it was on a 256-color Mac driving a 3-year-old (at the time) uncalibrated monitor. Yet somehow, the results were fine. When needed, you look at the CMYK values. And it's worth mentioning that even calibrated displays are physically incapable of exactly matching printed output, anyway.
Spoken like a true print-shop monkey. They're not just training press goons at an art college. Presumably they're also teaching artistry. CMYK values? Yeah, sure, tell me the CMYK value of the flesh tone I'm trying to reproduce from a live model. Wait while I pull out by pantone chips and color wheel! Right. Art is largely done with eyeball comparison, not CMYK.
I work in a publishing company with hundreds of people using *gasp!* UNCALIBRATED LCDs. I know many artists and photographers in the area and NO ONE uses CRTs any more. All the work is being produced on LCD screens.
Yeah, OK. How many of those LCD screens are of the cheap variety found on the kind of laptop a student is likely to have vs. (for example) high quality Apple cinema displays designed specifically with accurate color rendition in mind?
We do have some press people here with calibrated displays, but do you think we EVER let ANYTHING out the door without seeing test prints? No.
Immaterial. Your process for catching color errors says nothing about the quality of your output.
The fact is, most of the Photoshop work happening on this planet happens on uncalibrated displays
So? Most photoshop users are mediocre graphic designers who think color correction is the red pen used by a teacher to mark tests or old ladies painting out red-eye from their grandkids' pictures.
and yet somehow the books make it to press, customers are happy, and the world keeps spinning.
Ah yes, the fine art of getting a book to press. Like I said before, print shop monkey vs. artist.
I personally know several award-winning designers and photographers and NONE of them own calibrated displays.
And I'd wager not one of them does their graphics work on a $1400 Dell laptop, which was essentially the central premise of my point.
Which would you rather have: a talented designer on a crappy computer, or a crappy designer on a great computer?
Classic false dichotomy. I'd reject both and choose the talented designer who's smart enough not to try to do art on a crappy eMachines laptop.
Anyone who says "You can't use Photoshop on an LCD" ranks right down there with audiophiles going on about their $300 cables and how CDs, let along MP3s, cannot be listened to.
And anyone who thinks color is so unimportant to artists that any old LCD is as good as a CRT is clearly a print shop goon. This is an art college, not a night school where middle aged women learn to lay out church newsletters. Trying to teach artistry and instructing students to bring their own laptops (and I guarantee they won't spec Powerbooks with good displays, it'll be typical wintel crap for the baseline) is like telling painters to prop their canvases up under fluorescent light in order to paint a scene lit by sunlight. It's bad education.
No we wouldn't, otherwise we'd be refining it from fly ash.
He didn't say it would be a cheaper or easier source of uranium than mining, only that the uranium in coal could produce more energy than the coal itself.
The fact that in sixty years we haven't found a way of dealing with nuclear waste
What do you mean? Reprocessing essentially eliminates the problem. The only reason we're not doing it now is the misconception that plutonium from a fuel reprocessing breeder reactor can be used in nuclear weapons.
Nuclear power is only cheap because tax payers pay for the clean up.
Clean up WHAT, exactly? Nuclear reactors are designed to keep the radiation inside. Are you talking about Chernobyl perhaps?
There's a very famous road sign that is on the major road connecting east and western parts of Russia that suggests rolling up your windows and driving very fast because of the contamination.
Never heard of that. If you are referring to Chernobyl, then you're talking about a single incident perpetrated by the safety-indifferent goons of the old Soviet Union. Hardly representative of nuclear power in general.
There have been a lot of projections on when we'll finally run out of petroleum, how about the various materials used to provide nuclear power? How much longer will it last?
The world supply of recoverable uranium is enough to last for around a thousand years, and that's with the current crop of horribly inefficient fission plants we're running now. If we reprocess the fuel using breeder reactors, multiply that by about a hundred-- and the waste storage problem is essentially eliminated as an added bonus.
If it is the latter, we will have our own Chernobyl in time.
I know it's popular to raise the specter of Chernobyl any time talk turns to building more nuclear reactors, but really it's absolutely absurd to make the comparison. Only the kind of utter disregard for safety found in places like the old Soviet Union could allow the operation a reactor with such a dangerously high void coefficient, positive power coefficient, combustible graphite shielding, and bypassable safety systems. The RBMK style reactor at Chernobyl was designed to use poorly enriched recycled uranium fuel. No one's going to build and fuel a reactor like that, and they certainly won't operate it with the absolute idiocy the Soviet crew at Chernobyl did. Take, for example, Three Mile Island. TMI-2 had a partial core meltdown (approx. 1/3), and the only serious consequences were in public relations (e.g. airheads like Jane Fonda lobbying against nuclear power) and cost of cleanup.
So essentially, you're saying the onus is on copyright holder to tell someone not to steal their product?
Last time I checked, the law didn't work like that.
Last I checked copyright law had nothing to do with theft.
but what about *art schools* or other colleges with high-end needs but mostly non-technical users, and where something like Photoshop is considered a 'core' application more than MS Office?
Unless you're just teaching the basic functionality, the color rendition of the laptop LCD screen is inadequate for Photoshop.
Google for "solar phone charger" or similar and your problem is solved. The smaller models can be velcroed to the top of your backpack.
Yeah, I tried that. I have a solar charger that works for that and also AA batteries. I just got to the point where I was hauling my ebook, a GPS (4AA's), a digital camera (4AA's), MP3 player (2AA's), and flashlight (2AA's), and a sack of spares. Got to be I was juggling electronics the whole time. I pared it down to an old paperback, 2 lithium AA's in a cheaper, lower power GPS (with 4 spares), a disposable film camera, and an LED hand-crank flashlight. Much less worry about breaking stuff, much lighter weight-- much happier.
This pretty much makes me not believe what these people have to say. I cannot believe that it is possible to repeatedly drive blind for 10 seconds at 60mph without incident.
"Eyes off the road" != "driving blind". Peripheral vision is usually adequate for most people to keep the car pointed in the right direction and catch things like brake lights. Looking over at your nav system for 10 seconds at a time is indeed quite possible. You see, it's not a matter of vision, but a matter of attention. Most of the time the other drivers around you are behaving in a predictable manner. It's when an unusual event (tire blowout, objects in the road, etc) occurs and your attention cannot be brought back to the road quickly enough to avoid an incident that you get in trouble.
I agree with all your points but this one. I have an old B&W LCD Gemstar Ebook I take with me car camping. I holds the entire works of Twain, Dickens, and Pratchett, plus the 2005 National Electrical Code and scores of other random books. It's only half full. Added bonus: read at night in 0 ambient light with the backlight-- though this Sony e-paper book thing is unlikely to have illumination. Admittedly, on backcountry hikes I take paper because there's no electricity and the battery only lasts a week or so; but nothing beats having a few hundred texts at you disposal in a handheld device.
but your children will be trying to sneak onto fishing boats headed for china to try to get work so they can send a few yen back to feed their starving families.
So, if a document is reclassfied, is it a crime to have a copy that you got while it was 'open'? Is it 'forbidden knowledge'?
No. Think of classification like trade secret law. There's nothing illegal about knowing a trade secret, but if you are entrusted with keeping it secret, then you can get in trouble for divulging it.
All Electronics Corp
A fine collection of hobbyist parts and gadgets. Spec sheets online for items that they have them for. Every once in a while, I'll do a batch order of parts to fill the parts bin on the workbench. Flat-rate shipping prices for USA are fair also ($7 for any order).
Man, I love that place. If you like their web site, you should see one of their physical stores. Shelves and shelves of components, stacks of mechanical parts, cardboard boxes full of circuit boards pulled from mystery devices, old electronic machines of indeterminate function... I could wander around there for hours.
Their Van Nuys store was on my way home for several years and I probably stopped there four times a week.
The portable document format was really established to facilitate the paper-less office, by taking content that normally would be printed (like word documents or spreadsheets) and turn them into an electronic version that is standardized across multiple platforms.
That doesn't really facilitate the paperless office, as it perpetuates the printed-document layout. Why would a truly paperless office need electronic documents formatted for 8.5x11 paper? It's a paper reduction scheme, but its very purpose is the facilitate the printing of paper documents.
I didn't know space ships ran on gasoline. Silly me.
Silly you seems to be ignorant of the fact that gasoline is but one of the many products obtained from petroleum. The first stage of the Saturn V launch system was actually fueled by kerosene. Most modern rockets use liquid hydrogen, though; and while it could be argued that hydrogen is not a direct petroleum product per se, 78% of the hydrogen produced today is cracked from natural gas or oil. So yes, availability of cheap fuel.
All these details I learned in 5 minutes just by reading the entries for "rocket fuel" and "hydrogen economy" in wikipedia. The internet can make you sound smarter, but only if you use it.
The internet was only opened to the public in 1990's. Nobody could tell then what it would look like and how (if at all) it would be used by wide public. As to blogging, it only gained public awareness in this millenium.
Card's "Locke and Demosthenes" bit could hardly have been described as a blog. It was public message boards, exactly like those found on CompuServe and scores of public and private BBS's. From Ch 9, Valentine to Peter on his plan to go on the net and manipulate public opinion:
"On the nets we are clearly identified as students, and we can't even get into the real discussions except in audience mode, which means we can't say anything anyway."
Sounds more like a moderated newsgroup discussion than a "blog" to me.
The internet was only opened to the public in 1990's. Nobody could tell then what it would look like and how (if at all) it would be used by wide public.
I don't understand. Are you now saying he's a visionary, or that being a visionary would be impossible?
And where the heck did you come up that he only thought the network would be text-based??
From the complete lack of reference to digital images or video outside of Ender's little video game perhaps?
Anyway, you missed the whole point. It was concievable that the technology would be developed to the stage that we see now (although the amount of small details that turned out to be correct is surprising). It is much more difficult to predict how the technology will be used, to what extent it will be part of our lives, and its social impact. The technological "atmosphere" described really captures the essence of what we only begin to experience today.
I don't think I did miss the point. The description of "the nets" exactly fits a USENET or networked BBS message bases (e.g. FidoNet), the former being familiar to most university students of the time, and the latter being downright common and publicly accessible to boot. It wasn't particularly visionary, it was a weakly extrapolated mirror of existing things.
Yeah, the ECA days...that cube, sphere, pyramid logo was damn clever.
Oi, and of course the oh-so-clever Commodore 64 copy protection schemes. The bizarre "half-tracking" reading scheme that slowed load times to a crawl and tended to crap out if the drive was even slightly misaligned.
remember I lost my first attempt at Ultima 7 because I started wandering around and hit the story elements out of order.
Really? It's been a couple years since I played U7, but I seem to recall that you couldn't hit anything out of order, in that certain characters didn't have anything to say, or sometimes don't even appear until precursor storylines had been opened. I loved U7 for that. Free to wander and explore whatever small side-stories you wanted, or just roam the countryside adventuring, pursuing the larger story as it strikes your fancy...
I've re-read Ender's Game lately (written in 1985), and was amased by some of the predictions Orson made in just one book.
Really? I saw nothing particularly insightful.
The "network"
Gosh, he envisioned a worldwide network only only 15-20 years after the creation of early world-wide networks like compuserve and the internet.
online news and bloggers
'cause no one was doing anything even remotely like that which could be fictionally extrapolated, like USENET of BBS's.
hand-held devices used for education (we only start seing them now)
Yeah, unprecedented. Those hand-held slates and chalk children used in the 19th century bear no resemblance to tablet PCs. No writer but the most visionary could predict hand held computers in 1985, when every high school student had a scientific calculator, and computers had (over the previous 10 years) shrunk from room-sized to desktop sized. Every kid with a Commodore 64 and half an ounce of imagination envisioned a future where computers were the size of an Etch-A-Sketch
Card's sci-fi was pretty pedestrian in the visionary sense. Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) was far and away more visionary. The fact that Card didn't even bother to imagine the worldwide network being anything but text-based is pretty telling.
and they actually made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Honestly, is there anyone over the age of 12 that's still impressed with anything in the Guiness Book of World Records? And even if so, why is a record of "Worlds Smallest Scanner" even worth recording? It'll be beaten as a matter of course when the R900 comes out.
"At a recent estimate, around 30% of the power consumed in my house is via these adapters."
You're new here, aren't you. By "new", I mean, new to this planet. Apparently you have no idea how much a TV uses, or how much a refridgerator or microwave uses.
So this article is a "tripe", and also has a stupider premise than the others. Thanks, "editors".
Cripes, who modded the parent "troll"? The premise is stupid, and the question has been hashed out on/. at least twice before specifically, and many times more in sub-threads attached to peripherally related stories. The questioner shows (as usual) a complete lack of understanding of the basics of electrical theory. It's as asinine a question as "why don't they attach [capacitors|batteries] to lightning rods to save the electricity", or "why can't we just power the whole country off a giant solar panel farm in the mojave desert".
On closer examination, these adapters seem to fall into four major categories, 7V, 5V and 3V, with the most common being 5V.
Either he's only looking at his Palm Pilot charger and ethernet router, or he's managed to somehow not end up with a truly representative sample. Upon closer examination, you'd also find 20V, 16V, 12V, and a few 9V. Upon even closer examination you'd also find that some of these show up as AC sometimes. Herein lies the problem. There is no "standard" low voltage. It ranges from 3V to 24V, can be AC or DC, and randomly requires one of forty-odd connectors wired at no particular polarity.
Minor nitpick. Copyright infringement involves neither stealing nor goods, so it is a remarkably poor example of "stolen goods". Copyright infringement is simply copyright infringement. It even has its own section of law, completely separate from the laws covering theft of real property.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people, but not artists. Perhaps I assume too much, but I assume they teach art at this art college.
Design, layout, compositing--so little requires knowing *exactly* how it the colors will look when printed.
Like I said, basic functionality. As opposed to anything where you need to know the color you're using.
When I started using Photoshop here ten years ago, it was on a 256-color Mac driving a 3-year-old (at the time) uncalibrated monitor. Yet somehow, the results were fine. When needed, you look at the CMYK values. And it's worth mentioning that even calibrated displays are physically incapable of exactly matching printed output, anyway.
Spoken like a true print-shop monkey. They're not just training press goons at an art college. Presumably they're also teaching artistry. CMYK values? Yeah, sure, tell me the CMYK value of the flesh tone I'm trying to reproduce from a live model. Wait while I pull out by pantone chips and color wheel! Right. Art is largely done with eyeball comparison, not CMYK.
I work in a publishing company with hundreds of people using *gasp!* UNCALIBRATED LCDs. I know many artists and photographers in the area and NO ONE uses CRTs any more. All the work is being produced on LCD screens.
Yeah, OK. How many of those LCD screens are of the cheap variety found on the kind of laptop a student is likely to have vs. (for example) high quality Apple cinema displays designed specifically with accurate color rendition in mind?
We do have some press people here with calibrated displays, but do you think we EVER let ANYTHING out the door without seeing test prints? No.
Immaterial. Your process for catching color errors says nothing about the quality of your output.
The fact is, most of the Photoshop work happening on this planet happens on uncalibrated displays
So? Most photoshop users are mediocre graphic designers who think color correction is the red pen used by a teacher to mark tests or old ladies painting out red-eye from their grandkids' pictures.
and yet somehow the books make it to press, customers are happy, and the world keeps spinning.
Ah yes, the fine art of getting a book to press. Like I said before, print shop monkey vs. artist.
I personally know several award-winning designers and photographers and NONE of them own calibrated displays.
And I'd wager not one of them does their graphics work on a $1400 Dell laptop, which was essentially the central premise of my point.
Which would you rather have: a talented designer on a crappy computer, or a crappy designer on a great computer?
Classic false dichotomy. I'd reject both and choose the talented designer who's smart enough not to try to do art on a crappy eMachines laptop.
Anyone who says "You can't use Photoshop on an LCD" ranks right down there with audiophiles going on about their $300 cables and how CDs, let along MP3s, cannot be listened to.
And anyone who thinks color is so unimportant to artists that any old LCD is as good as a CRT is clearly a print shop goon. This is an art college, not a night school where middle aged women learn to lay out church newsletters. Trying to teach artistry and instructing students to bring their own laptops (and I guarantee they won't spec Powerbooks with good displays, it'll be typical wintel crap for the baseline) is like telling painters to prop their canvases up under fluorescent light in order to paint a scene lit by sunlight. It's bad education.
He didn't say it would be a cheaper or easier source of uranium than mining, only that the uranium in coal could produce more energy than the coal itself.
What do you mean? Reprocessing essentially eliminates the problem. The only reason we're not doing it now is the misconception that plutonium from a fuel reprocessing breeder reactor can be used in nuclear weapons.
Nuclear power is only cheap because tax payers pay for the clean up.
Clean up WHAT, exactly? Nuclear reactors are designed to keep the radiation inside. Are you talking about Chernobyl perhaps?
There's a very famous road sign that is on the major road connecting east and western parts of Russia that suggests rolling up your windows and driving very fast because of the contamination.
Never heard of that. If you are referring to Chernobyl, then you're talking about a single incident perpetrated by the safety-indifferent goons of the old Soviet Union. Hardly representative of nuclear power in general.
The world supply of recoverable uranium is enough to last for around a thousand years, and that's with the current crop of horribly inefficient fission plants we're running now. If we reprocess the fuel using breeder reactors, multiply that by about a hundred-- and the waste storage problem is essentially eliminated as an added bonus.
I know it's popular to raise the specter of Chernobyl any time talk turns to building more nuclear reactors, but really it's absolutely absurd to make the comparison. Only the kind of utter disregard for safety found in places like the old Soviet Union could allow the operation a reactor with such a dangerously high void coefficient, positive power coefficient, combustible graphite shielding, and bypassable safety systems. The RBMK style reactor at Chernobyl was designed to use poorly enriched recycled uranium fuel. No one's going to build and fuel a reactor like that, and they certainly won't operate it with the absolute idiocy the Soviet crew at Chernobyl did. Take, for example, Three Mile Island. TMI-2 had a partial core meltdown (approx. 1/3), and the only serious consequences were in public relations (e.g. airheads like Jane Fonda lobbying against nuclear power) and cost of cleanup.
All of us had this idea years ago. Only HP is dumb enough to think they can make money selling one.
Last I checked copyright law had nothing to do with theft.
Unless you're just teaching the basic functionality, the color rendition of the laptop LCD screen is inadequate for Photoshop.
Yeah, I tried that. I have a solar charger that works for that and also AA batteries. I just got to the point where I was hauling my ebook, a GPS (4AA's), a digital camera (4AA's), MP3 player (2AA's), and flashlight (2AA's), and a sack of spares. Got to be I was juggling electronics the whole time. I pared it down to an old paperback, 2 lithium AA's in a cheaper, lower power GPS (with 4 spares), a disposable film camera, and an LED hand-crank flashlight. Much less worry about breaking stuff, much lighter weight-- much happier.
"Eyes off the road" != "driving blind". Peripheral vision is usually adequate for most people to keep the car pointed in the right direction and catch things like brake lights. Looking over at your nav system for 10 seconds at a time is indeed quite possible. You see, it's not a matter of vision, but a matter of attention. Most of the time the other drivers around you are behaving in a predictable manner. It's when an unusual event (tire blowout, objects in the road, etc) occurs and your attention cannot be brought back to the road quickly enough to avoid an incident that you get in trouble.
I agree with all your points but this one. I have an old B&W LCD Gemstar Ebook I take with me car camping. I holds the entire works of Twain, Dickens, and Pratchett, plus the 2005 National Electrical Code and scores of other random books. It's only half full. Added bonus: read at night in 0 ambient light with the backlight-- though this Sony e-paper book thing is unlikely to have illumination. Admittedly, on backcountry hikes I take paper because there's no electricity and the battery only lasts a week or so; but nothing beats having a few hundred texts at you disposal in a handheld device.
Yuan (RMB), not yen. Yen is Japan.
No. Think of classification like trade secret law. There's nothing illegal about knowing a trade secret, but if you are entrusted with keeping it secret, then you can get in trouble for divulging it.
Man, I love that place. If you like their web site, you should see one of their physical stores. Shelves and shelves of components, stacks of mechanical parts, cardboard boxes full of circuit boards pulled from mystery devices, old electronic machines of indeterminate function... I could wander around there for hours.
Their Van Nuys store was on my way home for several years and I probably stopped there four times a week.
That doesn't really facilitate the paperless office, as it perpetuates the printed-document layout. Why would a truly paperless office need electronic documents formatted for 8.5x11 paper? It's a paper reduction scheme, but its very purpose is the facilitate the printing of paper documents.
Silly you seems to be ignorant of the fact that gasoline is but one of the many products obtained from petroleum. The first stage of the Saturn V launch system was actually fueled by kerosene. Most modern rockets use liquid hydrogen, though; and while it could be argued that hydrogen is not a direct petroleum product per se, 78% of the hydrogen produced today is cracked from natural gas or oil. So yes, availability of cheap fuel.
All these details I learned in 5 minutes just by reading the entries for "rocket fuel" and "hydrogen economy" in wikipedia. The internet can make you sound smarter, but only if you use it.
Card's "Locke and Demosthenes" bit could hardly have been described as a blog. It was public message boards, exactly like those found on CompuServe and scores of public and private BBS's. From Ch 9, Valentine to Peter on his plan to go on the net and manipulate public opinion:
Sounds more like a moderated newsgroup discussion than a "blog" to me.
The internet was only opened to the public in 1990's. Nobody could tell then what it would look like and how (if at all) it would be used by wide public.
I don't understand. Are you now saying he's a visionary, or that being a visionary would be impossible?
And where the heck did you come up that he only thought the network would be text-based??
From the complete lack of reference to digital images or video outside of Ender's little video game perhaps?
Anyway, you missed the whole point. It was concievable that the technology would be developed to the stage that we see now (although the amount of small details that turned out to be correct is surprising). It is much more difficult to predict how the technology will be used, to what extent it will be part of our lives, and its social impact. The technological "atmosphere" described really captures the essence of what we only begin to experience today.
I don't think I did miss the point. The description of "the nets" exactly fits a USENET or networked BBS message bases (e.g. FidoNet), the former being familiar to most university students of the time, and the latter being downright common and publicly accessible to boot. It wasn't particularly visionary, it was a weakly extrapolated mirror of existing things.
Oi, and of course the oh-so-clever Commodore 64 copy protection schemes. The bizarre "half-tracking" reading scheme that slowed load times to a crawl and tended to crap out if the drive was even slightly misaligned.
Really? It's been a couple years since I played U7, but I seem to recall that you couldn't hit anything out of order, in that certain characters didn't have anything to say, or sometimes don't even appear until precursor storylines had been opened. I loved U7 for that. Free to wander and explore whatever small side-stories you wanted, or just roam the countryside adventuring, pursuing the larger story as it strikes your fancy...
Really? I saw nothing particularly insightful.
The "network"
Gosh, he envisioned a worldwide network only only 15-20 years after the creation of early world-wide networks like compuserve and the internet.
online news and bloggers
'cause no one was doing anything even remotely like that which could be fictionally extrapolated, like USENET of BBS's.
hand-held devices used for education (we only start seing them now)
Yeah, unprecedented. Those hand-held slates and chalk children used in the 19th century bear no resemblance to tablet PCs. No writer but the most visionary could predict hand held computers in 1985, when every high school student had a scientific calculator, and computers had (over the previous 10 years) shrunk from room-sized to desktop sized. Every kid with a Commodore 64 and half an ounce of imagination envisioned a future where computers were the size of an Etch-A-Sketch
Card's sci-fi was pretty pedestrian in the visionary sense. Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) was far and away more visionary. The fact that Card didn't even bother to imagine the worldwide network being anything but text-based is pretty telling.
Honestly, is there anyone over the age of 12 that's still impressed with anything in the Guiness Book of World Records? And even if so, why is a record of "Worlds Smallest Scanner" even worth recording? It'll be beaten as a matter of course when the R900 comes out.
You're new here, aren't you. By "new", I mean, new to this planet. Apparently you have no idea how much a TV uses, or how much a refridgerator or microwave uses. So this article is a "tripe", and also has a stupider premise than the others. Thanks, "editors".
Cripes, who modded the parent "troll"? The premise is stupid, and the question has been hashed out on /. at least twice before specifically, and many times more in sub-threads attached to peripherally related stories. The questioner shows (as usual) a complete lack of understanding of the basics of electrical theory. It's as asinine a question as "why don't they attach [capacitors|batteries] to lightning rods to save the electricity", or "why can't we just power the whole country off a giant solar panel farm in the mojave desert".
Yes there is. A 1200W microwave draws 10 amps at 120V. At 12V it would draw 100A. You have any idea how thick the wire has to be to handle 100A?
Either he's only looking at his Palm Pilot charger and ethernet router, or he's managed to somehow not end up with a truly representative sample. Upon closer examination, you'd also find 20V, 16V, 12V, and a few 9V. Upon even closer examination you'd also find that some of these show up as AC sometimes. Herein lies the problem. There is no "standard" low voltage. It ranges from 3V to 24V, can be AC or DC, and randomly requires one of forty-odd connectors wired at no particular polarity.
Minor nitpick. Copyright infringement involves neither stealing nor goods, so it is a remarkably poor example of "stolen goods". Copyright infringement is simply copyright infringement. It even has its own section of law, completely separate from the laws covering theft of real property.