There are a large number of military helicopters operating in the area carrying relief supplies and evacuating people and all sorts of other activities. They can get on the radio and tell other (human) traffic in the area to get out of the way. I'm betting this drone can't respond to such verbal requests.
So if I was FEMA and I was tasked with coordinating all of these helicopter flights I might also say no to any drones I wasn't positive wouldn't be accidentally running into a helicopter full of evacuees.
I'm curious if there is a current NOTAM requiring special clearance to fly, or to obey extra rules in the area (like a specific radio frequency). If there is and the drone isn't following them, it is in violation.
I can imagine someone arguing this is the free market working. Lobbying and representation is a product, and those with the most money are purchasing it.
All the people who only used the e-mail side of it just got their accounts deleted for "inactivity" since they never logged into Yahoo!, and thus never saw ads or otherwise generated revenue.
Group membership is dropping like a log with their effort to reclaim addresses.
I agree with your post in part, we need something for people to do, but I'm not so sure the smart people you referenced are solidly employable either.
For instance IBM is targeting doctors with Watson, and early trials are positive. The computer can know more about more things than a typical human. Also when it comes to programming and networking I see a contracting industry. As the products get "smarter" the number of designers and implementers is reduced. There was a day when a small business hired someone to do all of their computers and networking, now the ISP drops in a smart box, the OS just works, and they need far less help.
I think humans are being replaced across the board, some industries more than others, and it will be a major issue in the decades to come.
I work in the ISP industry, and here's my $0.02...
The NSA (or other spies), not likely. Everything I have ever seen about what they do is passive monitoring. What that means is that somewhere there is a pretty dumb device (like an optical splitter) that takes one signal and makes two copies, one goes to the NSA, one on to its destination. In this arrangement there is no way for the NSA to inject data at all, including slowing it down. I am highly skeptical any government spying is the direct cause. It may be indirect, I'll come back to that in a minute.
Rate shaping is entirely possible, and would be most likely in your immediate provider. It's entirely common for residential consumer ISP's to employ products like Sandvine, or even more crude QOS controls to rate limit particular types of traffic (e.g. VPN or VOIP). Most won't admit to what they are doing as well.
Rate shaping is less likely, but possible at the country level. This is seen mostly in countries with strong government controls on technology (think Iran, China, North Korea). Egypt was doing it at one point in time. I'm not an expert on Peru, but I would not expect this problem in Peru.
Lastly, is plain old congestion. Likely your ISP has multiple paths to reach Europe, riding undersea cables. These are the most expensive assets an ISP owns, and often get congested before they get upgraded. It's entirely possible for instance there is one cable they use from South American to Western Europe that is congested, while another goes from South America to the US and is fine. You can probably map these routes out by traceroute, and may find that particular routes always show poor performance. This also happens, but to a lesser degree, where two ISP's meet. There can be peering disputes, or one customer may not order enough capacity from their vendor. Either way the result is full ports that degrade service for everyone passing through them.
Now, here's where the spies come back in. If a particular spy agency decrees "all new connections must have our spy apparatus on them" they can in fact be the delay to a new connection getting set up. It's not that they are delaying any packet traffic once it is up, but rather they are delaying the installation by not having their equipment ready on time for a new connection. I don't think this happens often, but I'm sure it does happen in some places.
So sadly, this is probably some plain old incompetence/bad luck. Someone either could not afford a timely upgrade, or didn't correctly order an upgrade early enough to get it installed before there was a problem, and there's now congestion somewhere. If it's not bad luck it's probably your provider deciding your particular type of traffic is "bad", and should be rate limited down.
This is why many appliance makers choose Free/Net/OpenBSD as their base OS of choice, along with their more permissive licenses.
While my firm does not ship an appliance, I honestly can't imagine making the choice to use Linux for one if we did, given the other options out there.
I'm thinking this may well be a middle finger aimed at the political types in the UK who had Greenwald's partner detained. It's his way of saying, this may have been about civil liberties and constitutional protections for your own citizens, but if you're going to mess with people on our side we can mess with people on your side too. A shot across their bow to give them some idea of the other information he has that he can chose to publish about, or keep secret.
It appears the masses have already down voted this AC, but I think his comment is more insightful than it appears on the surface.
People go to LinkedIn for the value of vetted, business only relationships, and when they add everyone they are doing it wrong, and devaluing the entire service. What we should be talking about though is why they are doing it wrong, and a lot of it is that LinkedIn has incentives to push for more connections.
LinkedIn's value early on was that people added their real life connections. It was predicated on someone being a co-worker, or manager, or supplier. When you searched your network what you found was people who knew the actual person, and could vouch for them and/or provide a personal introduction.
As LinkedIn grew this rapidly declined. It started by people accepting requests from folks who were at the same company, but with which they did not interact. It grew when recruiters started friending everyone they contacted so their search network could grow. It jumped the shark when they put buttons that made it way too easy for someone to friend you just because you were in the same LinkedIn group with them, along with 10,000 others. And now, the expansion to students.
I know plenty of people with 1,000+ "friends" on LinkedIn. They don't know even 10% of those people close enough to introduce you, or provide a vouch. As a result, I no longer turn to LinkedIn. Too many of my "can you introduce me to" mails get back a "yeah, I don't really know them" response. There are too many incentives to "grow your network" by adding people you don't know, and not enough incentives to have a high value network, by having it be built on personal relationships.
So the magic is gone. The upward trend might continue a bit longer like a rocket who's motor has burned out as they add students and such, but the ultimate trajectory here is down unless some major course correction, in the form of dumping people you don't know, occurs.
For the narrow case where you have a unmodified Android phone and only get your applications from the Google Play Store, you are right, Google has the same capability.
But honestly, what percentage of Android users does that cover? 1%? 0.1%? Plenty of people use the Amazon app store, which I believe does not have the same capability on Android. What about apps from the Verizon App store, which many Verizon branded phones directed people to automatically for a while?
And of course there's always a side loaded app on Android. On IOS you can't side load, on most Android you can.
Look, I'm not saying IOS is better than Android in this case, just that Apple has iron clad single point of control for _ALL_ applications, while Google does not. There are some pros, and some cons to that. Consumers can choose which model they like btter.
Perhaps the AC doesn't know, the Open Group, you know, keeper of the Unix specification, has a certification program. Apple participates, and has the certificates to prove it.
No review process will ever catch all bad actors. I think Apple should be doing a better job with reviews in several dimensions, but that's not the prime advantage to the Apple ecosystem.
The main advantage is Apple can revoke the application. If this app started doing bad things Apple can remotely prevent it from running, and in fact revoke all apps by the same developer. This central control is what scares people, but it's also what makes long term exploitation impossible. The Google ecosystem doesn't have this feature, with no centralized control.
The results were overwhelming positive. Use of unnecessary force on citizens dropped. Bogus complaints against officers dropped. Time spent dealing with he-said she-said situations dropped.
Big cities should be jumping on this technology. In 2012 New York City spent 735 Million Dollars on settlements. I suspect cameras would dramatically reduce that number, both from officers being forced to be more careful but also from bogus citizen complaints being quickly dismissed with video proof.
Is Google Glass the right answer, no. It does way more than just video, and has cost and durability concerns. However personal video cameras are the answer, every cop (and probably firefighter and paramedic) should wear one.
Right of way has always been the problem for transportation. Long narrow corridors intersect many landowners. One of the major reasons the transcontinental railroads were able to be built by private industry is that the US Government owned much of the land, and gave it to them. They didn't have to go buy small strips of land from thousands of land owners.
Follow a small road project in your area. Land acquisition will take years, decades usually. There will always be several people who just don't want to sell, either because they like where they are, or don't like the project. Eminent Domain laws in this country were designed in the early 1800's, and really don't fit a modern society at all. Worse, as we see in California, with long haul transportation there are political objections as well. Whole towns and counties that won't cooperate.
There is no practical way for private industry to obtain the land needed to build rail/road/hyperloop in 99.99% of the cases. That's why most private roads are really "public-private partnerships", government gets the right of way, and then leases it to the company for a hundred years or something. If we want more efficient transportation the thing that needs to be debated is eminent domain and how society as a whole handles these issues. Can the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?
Most people here are focusing on the relationship between an employee and their employer, but the fact is that already went sour if someone is leaving. More important is your relationship with your coworkers. Communities tend to be smaller than you think,and word gets around. While your employer may do nothing but confirm the dates you worked their, a coworker when asked might spill the beans about how you dumped a mess in their lap. Down the road you may want to bring on a former coworker, or go to work where they end up.
If you can give no notice and not screw your coworkers, it's probably an option. If you're going to dump a big mess in their laps, you may want to give notice, and use the time to do your best to give it to them in a way that doesn't totally make their life crap for the next few weeks/months.
Encryption is not the solution but it is part of the solution.
Relying on any one method to make snooping hard makes for a simple target. Encryption alone will not fix the problem for the reasons stated. For instance, make your e-mail transport over SSL and they will just read it on the server. So you need e-mail over SSL and PGP encrypted e-mail content. Breaking just one of the encryption methods would not be sufficient.
Better technology is also needed though. What we have today is effectively pre-shared keys at the root of the certificate chain, which lead to this attack. Perfect Forward Secrecy is a step in the right direction, but not sufficient. We need to develop methods that either don't have any pre-shared keys, or if we have to use them require n of m, where each is controlled by a different regime preventing any one from compromising the system.
However, ubiquitous encryption would be a good first step, and I think raise the bar in an interesting world even if it is not perfect.
Actually, I think the ethernet/CF idea is spot on Apple's diagram in this patent. You'll notice they use two sets of contacts, one for SD, one for USB. In Apple's case they are at different depths, the SD card slides in further by the physical shape of the connector, hitting the deeper contacts.
Display Port is a bad example because it's one physical port that does two things electrically. Those headphone / AV out jacks on things like camcorders would would be another example. Those concepts are based on taking one physical form factor and doing two electrical things.
My Universal power strip idea is a bad example because it's multiple physical port types, but they all access the same thing, so there's no electrical difference.
But the Ethernet/CF idea is darn similar, take two physical ports and just find a way to physically overlay them in less space.
I want to point out, the patent goes to some lengths to try and patent the generic concept. The USB-or-SD card example in the patent comes with this disclaimer:
The foregoing description has broad application. For example, while examples disclosed herein may focus on an input port for receiving a USB plug and a SD card, it should be appreciated that the concepts disclosed herein may equally apply to connectors and plugs. Similarly, although the input port may be discussed with respect to a computer, the devices and techniques disclosed herein are equally applicable to any type of device including an external connector for transferring data and/or power.
I'm not a patent lawyer to know if in the rest of the description they have narrowed it in some way, but I suspect if they really want to make it that broad there are a few examples of prior art out there to be found. As for obviousness, I can think of a ton of things it would physically trivial to construct. How about a power socket with an RJ11 to plug in your phone between the pins? Or how about a ethernet (pins up) / Compact Flash (pins back) jack? All you need is two physical designs that don't interfere with each other when overlaid.
Normally I'm not a fan of the jump on the poster bandwagon, but this title and description could not be more misleading. The patent is on the idea of making one port take two standard connectors. The example used is a USB-or-SD Card physical form factor.
The design does not use "proprietary port"(s), rather it builds on existing standard port designs.
The design does not require a "special Apple cable", indeed the entire point is that standards compliant devices (not just cables, but things like SD cards) will just work.
As to the merits, it seems to me like there is probably prior art, and it may also fail the obviousness test. I'm not sure this is an idea that deserves patent protection. As devices get smaller, thinner, and lighter, I do think this is a great idea to reduce the physical space needed to provide all the ports a user might want.
A proper drywall electric screw gun has a collar / stop around the bit. The way it works is that when the collar hits the drywall it prevents the bit from following the screw. The momentum of the screw carries it just enough further than the bit cams out (as the phillips design intended), leaving the screw at the perfect depth.
Many DIY folks (and some, uh, low end "pros") use a regular drill driver, where it is far too easy to sink the screw way too far.
Here's a video by Bosch showing off some of their guns where you can clearly see the collar / stop in action. They talk about adjusting it for depth.
You took my comment a bit to literally and strongly. "It was never intended nor represented to be non-removable" is a far stronger statement than I (intended to) make. That is they are not like a security screw which has a specific purpose of being non-removeable. Rather my assertion is that removability was never part of the design criteria for a philips, so no effort was made in making them a fastener that could be removed and reinstalled multiple times with no damage. I don't believe for instance you'll ever find phillips with a "cycle count" listed for critical applications, where as it is easy to find things like bolts with a rated number of cycles.
Of course most phillips can be removed and reinstalled if you're careful with the drivers. We agree that the driver of the design was that slotted screws were not suited to the assembly line processes, and phillips were designed to be friendly to assembly line mechanization, including the cam-out behavior to save the tool being used. Early on they may have even been used for screws intended to be removed, but it was quickly discovered that was a poor choice of fastener for that application.
So I'll stand by my assertion that the vast majority of phillips installed today are never intended to be removed. The few that are intended to be removed are all used in low cycle count applications AND low torque applications, AND a desire for them to be serviced with commonly available tools. If any of those three aren't true other fasteners are almost always specified.
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Bah, hate replying to my own comment, there is a NOTAM: http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4481.html
"No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM (except as described)."
Reason for NOTAM : TO PROVIDE A SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR LARIMER COUNTY FLOODING SAR
So the drone operators are in violation of FAA rules.
Speculation on my part...
There are a large number of military helicopters operating in the area carrying relief supplies and evacuating people and all sorts of other activities. They can get on the radio and tell other (human) traffic in the area to get out of the way. I'm betting this drone can't respond to such verbal requests.
So if I was FEMA and I was tasked with coordinating all of these helicopter flights I might also say no to any drones I wasn't positive wouldn't be accidentally running into a helicopter full of evacuees.
I'm curious if there is a current NOTAM requiring special clearance to fly, or to obey extra rules in the area (like a specific radio frequency). If there is and the drone isn't following them, it is in violation.
I can imagine someone arguing this is the free market working. Lobbying and representation is a product, and those with the most money are purchasing it.
All the people who only used the e-mail side of it just got their accounts deleted for "inactivity" since they never logged into Yahoo!, and thus never saw ads or otherwise generated revenue.
Group membership is dropping like a log with their effort to reclaim addresses.
I agree with your post in part, we need something for people to do, but I'm not so sure the smart people you referenced are solidly employable either.
For instance IBM is targeting doctors with Watson, and early trials are positive. The computer can know more about more things than a typical human. Also when it comes to programming and networking I see a contracting industry. As the products get "smarter" the number of designers and implementers is reduced. There was a day when a small business hired someone to do all of their computers and networking, now the ISP drops in a smart box, the OS just works, and they need far less help.
I think humans are being replaced across the board, some industries more than others, and it will be a major issue in the decades to come.
I work in the ISP industry, and here's my $0.02...
The NSA (or other spies), not likely. Everything I have ever seen about what they do is passive monitoring. What that means is that somewhere there is a pretty dumb device (like an optical splitter) that takes one signal and makes two copies, one goes to the NSA, one on to its destination. In this arrangement there is no way for the NSA to inject data at all, including slowing it down. I am highly skeptical any government spying is the direct cause. It may be indirect, I'll come back to that in a minute.
Rate shaping is entirely possible, and would be most likely in your immediate provider. It's entirely common for residential consumer ISP's to employ products like Sandvine, or even more crude QOS controls to rate limit particular types of traffic (e.g. VPN or VOIP). Most won't admit to what they are doing as well.
Rate shaping is less likely, but possible at the country level. This is seen mostly in countries with strong government controls on technology (think Iran, China, North Korea). Egypt was doing it at one point in time. I'm not an expert on Peru, but I would not expect this problem in Peru.
Lastly, is plain old congestion. Likely your ISP has multiple paths to reach Europe, riding undersea cables. These are the most expensive assets an ISP owns, and often get congested before they get upgraded. It's entirely possible for instance there is one cable they use from South American to Western Europe that is congested, while another goes from South America to the US and is fine. You can probably map these routes out by traceroute, and may find that particular routes always show poor performance. This also happens, but to a lesser degree, where two ISP's meet. There can be peering disputes, or one customer may not order enough capacity from their vendor. Either way the result is full ports that degrade service for everyone passing through them.
Now, here's where the spies come back in. If a particular spy agency decrees "all new connections must have our spy apparatus on them" they can in fact be the delay to a new connection getting set up. It's not that they are delaying any packet traffic once it is up, but rather they are delaying the installation by not having their equipment ready on time for a new connection. I don't think this happens often, but I'm sure it does happen in some places.
So sadly, this is probably some plain old incompetence/bad luck. Someone either could not afford a timely upgrade, or didn't correctly order an upgrade early enough to get it installed before there was a problem, and there's now congestion somewhere. If it's not bad luck it's probably your provider deciding your particular type of traffic is "bad", and should be rate limited down.
No upvotes, but this is an important post that I'm afraid will be lost now that this story is a bit older.
This is why many appliance makers choose Free/Net/OpenBSD as their base OS of choice, along with their more permissive licenses.
While my firm does not ship an appliance, I honestly can't imagine making the choice to use Linux for one if we did, given the other options out there.
I'm thinking this may well be a middle finger aimed at the political types in the UK who had Greenwald's partner detained. It's his way of saying, this may have been about civil liberties and constitutional protections for your own citizens, but if you're going to mess with people on our side we can mess with people on your side too. A shot across their bow to give them some idea of the other information he has that he can chose to publish about, or keep secret.
It appears the masses have already down voted this AC, but I think his comment is more insightful than it appears on the surface.
People go to LinkedIn for the value of vetted, business only relationships, and when they add everyone they are doing it wrong, and devaluing the entire service. What we should be talking about though is why they are doing it wrong, and a lot of it is that LinkedIn has incentives to push for more connections.
LinkedIn's value early on was that people added their real life connections. It was predicated on someone being a co-worker, or manager, or supplier. When you searched your network what you found was people who knew the actual person, and could vouch for them and/or provide a personal introduction.
As LinkedIn grew this rapidly declined. It started by people accepting requests from folks who were at the same company, but with which they did not interact. It grew when recruiters started friending everyone they contacted so their search network could grow. It jumped the shark when they put buttons that made it way too easy for someone to friend you just because you were in the same LinkedIn group with them, along with 10,000 others. And now, the expansion to students.
I know plenty of people with 1,000+ "friends" on LinkedIn. They don't know even 10% of those people close enough to introduce you, or provide a vouch. As a result, I no longer turn to LinkedIn. Too many of my "can you introduce me to" mails get back a "yeah, I don't really know them" response. There are too many incentives to "grow your network" by adding people you don't know, and not enough incentives to have a high value network, by having it be built on personal relationships.
So the magic is gone. The upward trend might continue a bit longer like a rocket who's motor has burned out as they add students and such, but the ultimate trajectory here is down unless some major course correction, in the form of dumping people you don't know, occurs.
For the narrow case where you have a unmodified Android phone and only get your applications from the Google Play Store, you are right, Google has the same capability.
But honestly, what percentage of Android users does that cover? 1%? 0.1%? Plenty of people use the Amazon app store, which I believe does not have the same capability on Android. What about apps from the Verizon App store, which many Verizon branded phones directed people to automatically for a while?
And of course there's always a side loaded app on Android. On IOS you can't side load, on most Android you can.
Look, I'm not saying IOS is better than Android in this case, just that Apple has iron clad single point of control for _ALL_ applications, while Google does not. There are some pros, and some cons to that. Consumers can choose which model they like btter.
There are plenty of articles on the remote kill switch, here's one of the first: Steve Jobs confirms iPhone application "kill switch"
Perhaps the AC doesn't know, the Open Group, you know, keeper of the Unix specification, has a certification program. Apple participates, and has the certificates to prove it.
Mac OS X Version 10.8 Mountain Lion Certificate, from the people who own the Unix(TM) specification.
No review process will ever catch all bad actors. I think Apple should be doing a better job with reviews in several dimensions, but that's not the prime advantage to the Apple ecosystem.
The main advantage is Apple can revoke the application. If this app started doing bad things Apple can remotely prevent it from running, and in fact revoke all apps by the same developer. This central control is what scares people, but it's also what makes long term exploitation impossible. The Google ecosystem doesn't have this feature, with no centralized control.
The Rialto PD did a real world study, with a write up in the New York Times plus a formal report by a Cambridge University Professor.
The results were overwhelming positive. Use of unnecessary force on citizens dropped. Bogus complaints against officers dropped. Time spent dealing with he-said she-said situations dropped.
Big cities should be jumping on this technology. In 2012 New York City spent 735 Million Dollars on settlements. I suspect cameras would dramatically reduce that number, both from officers being forced to be more careful but also from bogus citizen complaints being quickly dismissed with video proof.
Is Google Glass the right answer, no. It does way more than just video, and has cost and durability concerns. However personal video cameras are the answer, every cop (and probably firefighter and paramedic) should wear one.
I bet if we gave away that much land today to someone who built Hyperloop it would be done in a couple of years.
Right of way has always been the problem for transportation. Long narrow corridors intersect many landowners. One of the major reasons the transcontinental railroads were able to be built by private industry is that the US Government owned much of the land, and gave it to them. They didn't have to go buy small strips of land from thousands of land owners.
Follow a small road project in your area. Land acquisition will take years, decades usually. There will always be several people who just don't want to sell, either because they like where they are, or don't like the project. Eminent Domain laws in this country were designed in the early 1800's, and really don't fit a modern society at all. Worse, as we see in California, with long haul transportation there are political objections as well. Whole towns and counties that won't cooperate.
There is no practical way for private industry to obtain the land needed to build rail/road/hyperloop in 99.99% of the cases. That's why most private roads are really "public-private partnerships", government gets the right of way, and then leases it to the company for a hundred years or something. If we want more efficient transportation the thing that needs to be debated is eminent domain and how society as a whole handles these issues. Can the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?
Most people here are focusing on the relationship between an employee and their employer, but the fact is that already went sour if someone is leaving. More important is your relationship with your coworkers. Communities tend to be smaller than you think,and word gets around. While your employer may do nothing but confirm the dates you worked their, a coworker when asked might spill the beans about how you dumped a mess in their lap. Down the road you may want to bring on a former coworker, or go to work where they end up.
If you can give no notice and not screw your coworkers, it's probably an option. If you're going to dump a big mess in their laps, you may want to give notice, and use the time to do your best to give it to them in a way that doesn't totally make their life crap for the next few weeks/months.
Encryption is not the solution but it is part of the solution.
Relying on any one method to make snooping hard makes for a simple target. Encryption alone will not fix the problem for the reasons stated. For instance, make your e-mail transport over SSL and they will just read it on the server. So you need e-mail over SSL and PGP encrypted e-mail content. Breaking just one of the encryption methods would not be sufficient.
Better technology is also needed though. What we have today is effectively pre-shared keys at the root of the certificate chain, which lead to this attack. Perfect Forward Secrecy is a step in the right direction, but not sufficient. We need to develop methods that either don't have any pre-shared keys, or if we have to use them require n of m, where each is controlled by a different regime preventing any one from compromising the system.
However, ubiquitous encryption would be a good first step, and I think raise the bar in an interesting world even if it is not perfect.
Actually, I think the ethernet/CF idea is spot on Apple's diagram in this patent. You'll notice they use two sets of contacts, one for SD, one for USB. In Apple's case they are at different depths, the SD card slides in further by the physical shape of the connector, hitting the deeper contacts.
Display Port is a bad example because it's one physical port that does two things electrically. Those headphone / AV out jacks on things like camcorders would would be another example. Those concepts are based on taking one physical form factor and doing two electrical things.
My Universal power strip idea is a bad example because it's multiple physical port types, but they all access the same thing, so there's no electrical difference.
But the Ethernet/CF idea is darn similar, take two physical ports and just find a way to physically overlay them in less space.
I want to point out, the patent goes to some lengths to try and patent the generic concept. The USB-or-SD card example in the patent comes with this disclaimer:
The foregoing description has broad application. For example, while examples disclosed herein may focus on an input port for receiving a USB plug and a SD card, it should be appreciated that the concepts disclosed herein may equally apply to connectors and plugs. Similarly, although the input port may be discussed with respect to a computer, the devices and techniques disclosed herein are equally applicable to any type of device including an external connector for transferring data and/or power.
I'm not a patent lawyer to know if in the rest of the description they have narrowed it in some way, but I suspect if they really want to make it that broad there are a few examples of prior art out there to be found. As for obviousness, I can think of a ton of things it would physically trivial to construct. How about a power socket with an RJ11 to plug in your phone between the pins? Or how about a ethernet (pins up) / Compact Flash (pins back) jack? All you need is two physical designs that don't interfere with each other when overlaid.
Normally I'm not a fan of the jump on the poster bandwagon, but this title and description could not be more misleading. The patent is on the idea of making one port take two standard connectors. The example used is a USB-or-SD Card physical form factor.
The design does not use "proprietary port"(s), rather it builds on existing standard port designs.
The design does not require a "special Apple cable", indeed the entire point is that standards compliant devices (not just cables, but things like SD cards) will just work.
As to the merits, it seems to me like there is probably prior art, and it may also fail the obviousness test. I'm not sure this is an idea that deserves patent protection. As devices get smaller, thinner, and lighter, I do think this is a great idea to reduce the physical space needed to provide all the ports a user might want.
A proper drywall electric screw gun has a collar / stop around the bit. The way it works is that when the collar hits the drywall it prevents the bit from following the screw. The momentum of the screw carries it just enough further than the bit cams out (as the phillips design intended), leaving the screw at the perfect depth.
Many DIY folks (and some, uh, low end "pros") use a regular drill driver, where it is far too easy to sink the screw way too far.
Here's a video by Bosch showing off some of their guns where you can clearly see the collar / stop in action. They talk about adjusting it for depth.
You took my comment a bit to literally and strongly. "It was never intended nor represented to be non-removable" is a far stronger statement than I (intended to) make. That is they are not like a security screw which has a specific purpose of being non-removeable. Rather my assertion is that removability was never part of the design criteria for a philips, so no effort was made in making them a fastener that could be removed and reinstalled multiple times with no damage. I don't believe for instance you'll ever find phillips with a "cycle count" listed for critical applications, where as it is easy to find things like bolts with a rated number of cycles.
Of course most phillips can be removed and reinstalled if you're careful with the drivers. We agree that the driver of the design was that slotted screws were not suited to the assembly line processes, and phillips were designed to be friendly to assembly line mechanization, including the cam-out behavior to save the tool being used. Early on they may have even been used for screws intended to be removed, but it was quickly discovered that was a poor choice of fastener for that application.
So I'll stand by my assertion that the vast majority of phillips installed today are never intended to be removed. The few that are intended to be removed are all used in low cycle count applications AND low torque applications, AND a desire for them to be serviced with commonly available tools. If any of those three aren't true other fasteners are almost always specified.