More importantly, the message here is that being right doesn't matter; being good and obedient preserves you, while being right only makes you a martyr. If you expose the corruption of those in power, that's well and good, and a great civil duty; however, you must understand that you will be punished.

The implication is that, civil duty or not, you should think long and hard about pitching your own skin into the cause, because we sure as hell aren't going to reward you just for doing a great service to humanity. Read carefully and you'll notice the government said he'd even have to accept the consequences of speaking out and engaging in constructive protest: they decree you can dissent against their rule, and that's well and good, as long as they can punish you for your dissent--which is precisely the situation in North Korea, where you may speak out against Kim Jong-Un, and, importantly, accept the consequences of speaking out against him.

OnePlus One with 16GB NAND: $300

OnePlus One with 64GB NAND: $350

Run the cost of NAND chips. 64GB MLC NAND chips fluctuate at a spot price between $1.60 and $4.34. Adding 64GB of NAND to a platform costs $4.34, much less switching from an expensive 16GB NAND platform to a 64GB platform. A 32GB chip fluctuates between $1.70 and $2.93--two of those would cost $3.40 to $5.86--and the next common size down is 4GB MLC NAND. Once the manufacture process is reliable, the sheer silicon wafer size is what counts: a wafer carrying 32GB of NAND costs exactly as much as a wafer carrying 64GB NAND if exactly half of the 64GB NAND chips are non-functional due to manufacture errors and 100% of the 32GB NAND wafers are in working order.

Of course bulk agreements mean we can slim profit margins down: if I were to buy a million chips from a supplier, that supplier would make a large order from his silicon supplier, who would make a large order from his material supplier, who would make a large order from fuel and energy suppliers, and so forth. Each could negotiate a large purchase contract by which a sizable profit is made on large volume and slim margin, at each step compounding the per-unit cost savings in the final product, delivering to me at substantially below-market price.

I don't pretend to know that OnePlus paid $4 or $1.60 or so per 64GB chip; I am fully aware they likely paid substantially below-market, and that the market price I cite assumes they went fully off-the-shelf for small batches (which may have happened) and so paid more than they otherwise would have. I can't very well conjecture about how much less they might have paid than the amount I cite; I've had to run this based on the most expensive component prices available on the market.

The profit margin is demonstrably larger on the one with bigger NAND. You can ask them, but things like profit margins in specific are strategic business information: advertising that you're gouging people for additional luxury is a good way to destroy consumer faith by arrogance and entitlement, and of course lead competitors to create a strategic opportunity by advertising that they don't gouge quite so hard when add extra NAND (the opportunity is to discredit your operations and to capture your market).

Small business or not, you'd be a fool to be that transparent.

Do you deny that the OnePlus One 64GB cost $50 more than its $16GB counterpart, while holding exactly the same specifications aside from an extra 48GB of NAND?

You seem to be using "since this, thus unrelated" logic: the phone is a low-cost phone, therefor all parts inside must not be overpriced. More directly, you're using a fallacy of division: since the phone itself is not an over-priced piece of shit, each part inside must carry no inflation of cost. The phone is cheap for its hardware, therefor the inclusion of $16 more hardware at a price of $50 additional simply must be an established falsehood--even though we can clearly demonstrate that the hardware does indeed cost less than $50.

An SD slot with working controller costs $1.66, including all the voltage regulators, capacitors, and resistors to support the interface. You may need a dedicated $1.30 Atmel 8-bit microcontroller to control it, or you can pipe it into an existing microcontroller on your board (truth be told, a dedicated microcontroller probably won't save you the bus pins). Additional NAND costs $16, and they charge $50 for it.

Wireless power is excessively inefficient. Current projections suggest cell phones use 10% of the world's energy per year; wireless power is 10% as efficient as direct contact charging, meaning the total worldwide energy draw required for wireless charging would be just about 100% of the world's current energy consumption.

When reaching down into your pocket, your arm is oriented downward, wrist spatially above your hand. When you raise your hand up to your face, your wrist is spatially below your hand. Through the movement, you rotate the phone 180 degrees: the part of your phone at the bottom of your pocket is the part of your phone pointed upward when raised to view. This is largely because your hip is below your elbow and shoulder, while your face is above your elbow and shoulder.

I put my phone in my pocket while listening on headphones. Without a bottom jack, I must rotate it in my hand, then place it in my pocket; then, on retrieval, I must rotate it back. Each rotation is a complex free movement with an exceedingly high chance of dropping the phone, or a two-handed affair which carries a low but significant chance of dropping the phone. A bottom jack means the phone leaves and returns to my pocket with a firm grip upon it, due to already holding it firmly or being unable to remove it from my pocket without holding it firmly.

I suppose you could put a bulky, over-sized, insufficient case on your phone, making it 3 times thicker and more ungainly to handle--and still prone to damage when dropped.

My OnePlus One has NFC, but the OnePlus 2 doesn't. I used NFC to transfer my Google account settings, which didn't really transfer much. From what I can find, NFC is incredibly difficult to configure and use--sending an MMC to transfer a picture or video is a lot faster and easier.

Wireless charging is also a waste. You have to be right up with it, and it uses 10 times as much power to provide as much charge to the phone. Likewise, quick charging, while nice, just doesn't make much sense when every car with bluetooth has a USB port, and every car add-on to connect a phone to a non-bluetooth radio has a charge port for your phone, and both have dash controls so your phone isn't hampered by being cabled. While I find it tough to actually get a 100% charge on my OnePlus One, I've had trouble getting it under 80% as well--even with just charging it for an hour to 90%-95% each night.

I'm not sure why front speakers are supposed to be any better than bottom speakers, although I see quite well why a bottom headphone jack is far superior to a top headphone jack. On the other hand, they could have gone hardware buttons or gone screen area for those bottom buttons, instead of hardware touch buttons.

The big drawbacks are really no slide-out keyboard and no SD slot.

Cost of 160GB of SD card NAND: $48

Cost of 48GB of same NAND soldered to the board: $50

They don't want you storing videos, pictures, music, and audio books on SD card; they want you to pay over 3x as much for that same SD card.

Wait, so besides the obvious defamation, conspiracy, and direct attack on a large business not to simply comment on their business in earnest, but to negatively affect their stock price by manufactured slander and libel, this attorney general is also guilty of obstruction of justice?

Neonicotines aren't showing any sort of impact on honeybees. In continental areas where they're banned (bees travel like 3 miles; banning them in half the fucking EU means you don't have any neonicotines 10 years later).

We actually think a new parasite evolved somewhere about 2009...

Not necessarily.

We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.

The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.

They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.

Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.

Monoculture is a dumb theory. Back 150 years ago, the Italians were the bee of choice. Today, people vary between Italians, Russians, Buckfast, Germans, Carnies ... some have MH or VSH genes, and most are wild-mated with local bees to obtain genetic memory of the local climate (that is: bees with instinctive behaviors adapted for local survival are the ones flying around wild mating with your virgin queens).

We have more genetic diversity now than ever. Even with colonies vanishing, the bees swap genetics like crazy--every time a queen dies (every 7 years for a hive, roughly), and rapidly when they swarm due to massive reductions in the bee population (meaning lots of available nectar). It's actually hard to lose genetic traits in the honeybee population.

We've got "survivor" strains which survive CCD. Many of them have MH and VSH genes, although MH dilutes quickly. The gene pool has rapidly improved.

When honey bees die off, there's an excess of available nectar due to fewer pollinators. Hives fill with bees, who start packing brood comb with collected honey; in response, they raise a new queen. The old queen takes 1/3 of the bees and leaves, while the old hive grows a replacement. You now have two hives. A hive can swarm 3-5 times easily if conditions persist to drive swarm behavior.

Bees really don't go extinct very easily. They rapidly replace any lost colonies, rebounding the population in a few short months. It's always the survivors who rebound. In this latest round, we've started to suspect evolution of a new plague of parasitic flies, each of which infects one live bee and produces 8-12 offspring; hives which go unaffected or which resist the parasite will spread, immediately requiring broad mating--the virgin queen goes out to find a bunch of drones (not all from the same hive, either) to get busy with, then comes back laying eggs. Each time a hive collapses, its genetics have already been passed on many times, and its capacity for nectar consumption is left as surplus for another hive to expand and fill in. Even a new plague of parasitic flies can't extinct honey bees, and hardly manages to cut away at their genetic diversity.