That figure is misleading in the extreme. Even the 1 billion figure is low-balling it.

If you know what they mean, than it means something. Why are you complaining about language not living up to your arbitrary standards when it performs its purpose, to confer meaning?

The barriers for entry into the online storage market are low to the point of being non-existent. It is much less of a problem in this area than with e.g. OSes or oil production. And we are, presumably, not ending up with one player, but two: Amazon and Google, which should also limit foul play (but not eliminate it).

Even if they don't, the prosecutors depend on the police to help them with their cases. Pressing charges against the police could make evidence in unrelated cases harder to come by, hurting the other cases and the career of the prosecutor.

You don't need a hierarchy to explain the difference, stereotypes will do. Men are not expected to need help, so we don't help them.

If it was a hierarchy, we would expect either "manly" women (better women) or "womanly" men (lesser men) to be preferred, which is not what we observe: Both genders are expected to conform to the stereotype, and are punished for not doing so.

Aren't vdW interactions any non-ionic, non-covalent interactions, including dipole-dipole (though I wouldn't include hydrogen bonding, as they are partly covalent)? With London forces, that falls off with r^-6 being an example of vdW interactions?'

Of course, that still makes the summary wrong, but differently wrong.

It's not a straw man, as I did not indicate that you meant that gold was not a metal. It is an analogy, and possibly a bad analogy, like your platypus-duck one.

If only there was some way to indicate that a phrase wasn't used literally, they could have used that in the title, and then people wouldn't be think they had made air solid and made a fiber out of it.

Doesn't all of your citations only have one laser, that then focuses itself (hence "self-focusing")? Wheres this has two lasers, where one focus the other?

"Science" is the collective name for the methods for acquiring knowledge that has, over the last couple of thousand years, been shown to yield self-consistent results that are confirmable by other ways to get the same information. There might be other methods we haven't thought of yet (and realistically, "science" in a thousand years will include more methods than it does today), but for now, the methods collectively known as "science" are the ones we know work.

That is why the assumption that a method outside of science is not helpful in acquiring knowledge is reasonable.

For information transmission, yes. For other uses of EM radiation, not so much.

That would be in the same way that it would be silly to call gold a metal, because it is too soft to replace steel?

This does more or less what an optical fiber does: It keeps light on the right path by using differences in refractive index (though I imagine the exact process is different: Optical fibers use total internal reflection, this probably just uses refraction). An optical fiber has the additional advantage of being able to go around corners, but that is not what makes it an optical fiber; the refractive index profile is.

What about to get the reflected beam back to the starting point (thus "remote sensing", being able to do e.g. a Raman spectrum at a long distance)? Here, you have light scattering in all directions. The optical fiber will make sure that more of it gets back the way the original laser beam came. That could be phrased as "amplification", though I think another word would be more correct.

No, the ideal biological weapon does not spread from person to person. Any disease that does is guaranteed to infect your own population as well; it is basically a gun you can't aim, or a doomsday device (though not literally, it doesn't kill everybody).

If a male politician said the same thing in jest, he would be labelled as sexist scum, and his career would be more or less over. When a women does says it in jest, it is taken in that spirit. That difference is sexist.

Or to figure out why it is so contagious, so we can better treat future diseases that uses the same methods. Without more information, it is hard to tell which end goal is more likely.