The problem is that content providers often want the best of both worlds. I bet if your disk becomes corrupted or unreadable, they will make you pay for another one. If they want to claim they are licensing it, they should be required to allow you to receive a working copy if yours becomes corrupted. This is rarely the case. Either it should be a license or it should be a sale, and it should only be tied to physical media if it is a sale. Try getting a free replacement download of a game or song if it becomes corrupted. So, content providers want to prevent you from selling content by saying it's licensed, but they won't replace the copy if it becomes corrupted.

You're joking right? The question you pose is: "is the capability to actually image chemical structures practically useful?"

It's the frequency shift of the cantilever from its natural resonance frequency. And, yes, the scale bar is angstroms.

Are we sure this is a good idea?

While this robot is pretty neat and may work for one or so people, I don't believe it will be practical enough to become widespread. It seems that widespread videoconferencing would cheaper and more practical than deploying more than a few of these per organization. I can just see everyone watching video of everyone else's robot. Also, my broadband seems to be down on the order of minutes/day, so I can imagine what it would be doing or where it would be stuck during such downtime.

Don't get me wrong, I think that this guy is clever and inventive and that such robots definitely have their place. I just don't think it's presently a viable solution for telecommuting.