I think the US needs to tell Chinese companies the same thing when they are putting lead paint on toys or melamine in milk or whatever other things they are trying to pass off to the American public. While I respect the right of the Chinese to decide their own laws and policies, I am pretty frustrated with the US's lack of courage to take a stance against the kind of things that the Chinese are trying to get away with, including tainted products and intellectual property theft.

ITA. That's just what I was about to write.

And you'd be producing a million widgets a day by tomorrow, right? YOU gotta be kidding ME.

I think this is an exaggeration, but the US is heavily reliant on China to keep the dollar strong. The economy of both countries would suffer miserably because China would no longer be able to export goods to the US and the dollar would be incredibly weak. Eventually, the US manufacturing base would grow, US exports would soar, and the economy would recover. Unfortunately, in the mean time, unemployment would also sky rocket, and the standard of living would rapidly fall.

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.