The fact that it's a bug and needs to be fixed hasn't changed. Its priority come debugging time just jumped up quite a bit because it went from a stability issue to a security issue.
Debugging is generally handled in a triage fashion. The first bugs to fix are easily exploitable remote exploits that allow arbitrary code execution with elevated privileges. Then come those that allow easy remote exploitation and arbitrary code execution at the user's restricted level. It goes on like that all the way down to a bug equivalent to "sometimes on platform X the last character of output sometimes is an extra newline that gets appended which is unnecessary".
If you have the time to make sure every piece of software you write is entirely and certifiably bug free, then that's great. Somehow, though, I imagine maintenance programming for the rest of us will probably still be prioritized based on severity.
To some extent that's true. The current generation of Macs, though, are almost entirely standards-based and use almost all off-the-shelf parts.
PCI, PCI Express, EFI, Core 2 Duo, ATX power supplies and motherboard form factor, SATA drives, USB, DVI, and 802.11b are all things other companies are free to use, including in combination with one another.
It's quite possible, as walterbyrd suggests at #23091740, that there's some small thing Apple uses that's encumbered. In that case, anyone who could figure out how to not use that little bit of patent-encumbered firmware would still be free to build a mostly identical machine.
Whether OS X would run on it unmodified might still be in question, but there's really no major change to the OS needed if it's just checking a checksum or calling an undocumented EFI extension and reading back the return value.
The main trait Monsanto seems to be worried about is the "Roundup Ready" trait, although they make other GM traits, too.
The whole idea of "Roundup Ready" is that Roundup is poisonous to most grassy and grain-bearing plants, including natural soybean and corn plants. The modifications to Roundup Ready plants are so that they are not killed by Roundup along with the weeds around them.
If most of your acreage is not Roundup Ready, you're not going to suddenly start using Roundup on your fields, as it will kill your entire harvest.
If you're not using Roundup, then the Roundup Ready trait isn't doing you any good. Where's the supposed benefit to the farmer?
BTW, Monsanto has been convicted of false advertising for claiming it's biodegradable and that it leaves the soil clean after use. There are weeds out there that are becoming immune, too, so its use as a single-product herbicide may become impractical.
Apple specs the hardware for Macs. They write the software for Macs. They write the drivers for Mac hardware for their OS.
MS writes an OS that runs on whatever POS hardware your great aunt bought at Radio Mart for $35 on clearance. There are tens of thousands of things you could stick into the slots of that monstrosity for your great aunt, each with a driver written by the hardware manufacturer that may or may not have passed MS's tests (or even been subjected to them). MS in particular gives video drivers a lot of access, still, to the video drivers for performance reasons. It's entirely possible for NVidia's driver to crash your OS (and it sometimes does!).
People think of Macs running OS X as stable and reliable. People think of PCs running Windows as rough-edged pieces of crap. What's more, they're right but much of that is based on the hardware people use for Windows.
It's true that many people find Windows to be an inferior OS in the first place and that MS has some abusive business practices. Still, running Windows on a Dell XPS, a Sony Vaio, or a well-built quality home build with good, solid drivers is entirely different from running it on Joe's 'Puter Shack Model 2 with the $12 motherboard and $10 RAM.
You have part of the solution with your spec for a clone being written by Apple for third parties. Those third parties would have to be policed pretty heavily to make sure they're not pushing the machines as compatible with everything PC. If people think they're getting a Mac compatible and it crashes and burns just like Windows, then those people will never step up for a $3000 Mac Pro.
You are not required to buy an XBox 360 to play Halo 3. You could buy the game and rent the console. I'm not sure that even amounts to tying. IANAL, but the examples of tying I've found require that they won't let you buy the game without buying the console. That the game is only compatible with a console that you are free not to buy I'm not sure qualifies. Ask a lawyer.
Selling a single out of a pair of shoes is not the same as selling an OS without a computer or a computer without an OS. Selling an OS at retail and tying it to a particular brand of computer is the business exception, not the rule.
Considering it's an Intel processor on a mostly PC-compatible motherboard (built by Foxconn last I checked) using the EFI standard developed by Intel for their Itanium systems, Intel/ATI/NVidia graphics (PCI-E), and bog-standard DDR2 memory modules I'll hazard a guess and say no.
They do have a possibly enforceable EULA, although whether it is and to what extent is beyond my layman's legal knowledge.
They also have trademarks on "Macintosh", "iMac", "eMac", "PowerMac", "MacBook", "Mac Pro", and any number of other "Mac" and "Macintosh" derivatives as applied to computer systems. This is probably the first stop for Apple's legal department I'd look for if I was on PsyStar's legal team, but what do I know?
I think there's a good chance that PsyStar just picked up a whole lot of publicity on the cheap, and will cease and desist rather quickly after getting the request from Apple then go on selling this bargain PC as a PC.
There were two ways to advertise a reasonable percentage, although I think some companies just estimated.
One was, since the original PC and MS-DOS were both so simple compared to today's systems, to list the percentage of BIOS and OS API calls that produced identical output from identical input.
The other was to run an automated test of a couple hundred top-selling DOS programs and advertise the percentage which ran without compatibility issues This seems more useful, but it's much more involved and it still doesn't make as much sense from the point of view of someone using lesser known software which might make more use of the less compatible parts.
Well, for one, it doesn't have what Stevens wrote in that entire other two-volume set, Unix Network Programming. This had Volume 1 (originally Sockets and XTI, but I think later just Sockets), and Volume 2: Inter-Process Communications.
The great thing about sticking to Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment for what it covers is that the same guy wrote the networking stuff in those others. He also wrote 3 volumes of TCP/IP Illustrated in case you really want to dig deeply into networking.
If you want to know everything about writing networked applications for a Unix platform without a lot of overlap, or if you're the type of reader who keeps track of connections among topics better when reading one writer's style (I know a couple people like this, but I'm not sure how common a concern it is) then reading it all from Stevens will be a big help.
Stevens was, however, not writing specifically about the Linux kernel and the GNU libc. There are likely very useful tidbits to be gained from someone who is. If the book is written well, it might be better to read that than to read Stevens and the Linux man pages side by side to get up to speed.
What's specifically better for someone looking to learn C than the second edition of K&R, which covers ANSI C?
There are certainly better books for first-time programmers, but that's largely because there are better languages for first-time programmers.
As an introduction to the C language, I think the book is a good tool. As an introduction to programming, perhaps SICP, something on ocaml, or something teaching a modern C descendant like D, Objective C, or even C#.
Perl is compiled into an AST, goes through code improvements, and then is executed.
Since it typically goes through this every time you use a program from the command line, the startup time tends to be pretty heavy.
If you're using something like mod_perl or FastCGI or some other caching dispatch mechanism, your program gets dispatched without recompilation if it hasn't been changed.
If your program is long-running, then the startup cost can become negligible.
Perl's common routines are written in optimized C and with good algorithmic design in mind. If someone writes an equivalent from scratch in C instead of using a good library, then the Perl version will have been designed and refined by far more people.
It's true that in many cases C comes out well faster than Perl, but those cases are not as common as people tend to think.
What the guy you're arguing with is saying is that a farmer who didn't buy licensed and restricted seeds has every right to do with his harvest what he damn well pleases. He bought the seed, he owns or leases the land, he planted it, fertilized it, applied herbicide to the weeds around it, harvested it, and insured it against hail, fire, and drought. He owns what he takes out of the field that he grew, and he can eat it, sell it, burn it, or use it.
The guy who buys Monsanto's seeds and signs a no reseeding contract gave up some of his rights in the contract. He didn't give up his neighbor's rights, as those aren't his rights to give up.
The farmers who don't buy patented GM seeds aren't trespassing onto the land of those who do and stealing pollen. The wind (yes, wind -- corn is self-pollinating or wind-pollinated as often as pollinated by bees) or bees do that naturally. The unnatural pollen many farmers consider dangerous crud actually invades non-GM farms and perverts their botanically hybridized crops. For that, should Monsanto be the plaintiff or the defendant?
If Monsanto is so concerned about their unnatural crops cross-pollinating other corn and beans, then they should GM it to keep it from doing that. It's not the fault of people trying to avoid it that the wind blows.
That's like running over a kid in a crosswalk while the walk sign is lit and suing the kid for being there because he dented your car. The kid's doing what he's supposed to do, you're infringing on his space, and then you blame him. That's what Monsanto is doing.
They've timed this to fairly well coincide with a new processor design that promises better performance than what they've had to date. Hopefully not just drivers but optimizations for their CPU will take off in maturity alongside the growth of their deployed footprint.
... "At least planetary systems like ours might be more common than previously thought over that direction, 5,000 years ago, at around the distance from us that light would take 5,000 years to get here. Or maybe somebody's holding up a distorted mirror 2,500 light years away. We're not really sure. Some scientist said we're discovering more than we used to, now that we're confident that we can detect them and bother looking. That must mean the spike in data is representative."
I'm looking hopefully forward to giving people directions by system name and planet number just as much as the next/. geek. I doubt, though, that thinking in general about the number of multi-planet systems has changed drastically because of this one system. Like most science reporting in the mainstream press, this is oversimplified and overhyped.
Very few sane ISPs route to ranges that are reserved by the RFCs. It creates extra traffic on failures if they do.
It's also bad to have a reserved address space attacking your other customers in a reserved address space across town. I had to set my own firewall up to drop 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16 addresses from the public side of my router when I had Insight Broadband (now owned by Comcast) because the cable-to-ethernet bridge would allow others to access my 10/8 (actually, 10.0.0/22) network I had set up. There's no reason to pass that.
AT&T does a host not reachable on 2.2.2.2 on the fourth hop from my box (my router, DSLAM, distribution router, aggregation router). Why should it try to store route information on something that's not going to be routable anyway?
If Comcast is sending back RST packets instead of ICMP messages, that's odd. It's not, however, provably evil.
Why the SSH connection is denied (unless Comcast bans all listening services, as some consumer-oriented ISP plans do) is far more interesting.
It is indeed a Microsoft host, as a whois check on ARIN tells me. It's also a host with no valid PTR record, so that's pretty good evidence the far end is screwed. How the hell hard is it to generate valid PTR records?
It also happens that ICMP ping requests are dropped at Microsoft's end and that a traceroute has a missing hop in it on Microsoft's end. Those are not controlled by Comcast, because I'm testing from AT&T.
As for the reserved addresses, it's not uncommon for a router to do a hard deny on packets destined for RFC-reserved IP address ranges. It keeps the rest of the network from having to route traffic to nowhere and back, and propagating the failure messages. A better check would be to try a known nonexistent address in a valid range.
These things don't mean Comcast doesn't suck. It just means the analysis could have been a bit better.
I'm not a Verizon customer, but my buddy and I did notice that our PTR records switched from.dsl. to.lightspeed. and that AT&T has spray-painted "Fiber DTC" on the streets and sidewalks near the CO here several weeks ago. Those are pretty good clues that we're getting something soon.
Sure enough, the talk radio station said the other day that AT&T PR reps had said that fiber-to-the-customer is well on its way.
It does tell us that the engineers are more useful to the terrorists, but I think that's just mirroring the rest of society.
That's the thing. If they're more useful, they'll be recruited more heavily. If they're recruited more heavily, they'll tend to make up a larger portion of the group.
There might be something to the idea that engineers and terrorists think somewhat alike, but there are much simpler explanations which cannot be discounted. When you can't discount a simpler explanation, you don't make the leap to the more spectacular reasoning unless you're looking to sensationalize the topic.
That engineers plan things well should be no surprise. Engineers as a group design everything from bridges to sports stadiums to computer chips. They try to find a good balance of expected average need, overbuild and contingency performance, and cost.
That both the terrorists and those fighting the terrorists would want chemical, electrical, structural, and electronics engineers for their specific areas of expertise alone should come as no surprise. That they're also found to be good planners in general is only slightly less obvious.
The assumption that all engineers are similar to terrorists I think is a stretch.
To say the reason for the action is as suspect is to say that the action itself is as suspect. If there's not a similar action, then the reasoning behind the actions are not held to as close scrutiny.
Taking a swim just for fun instead of specifically for exercise or for survival doesn't need to be explained. Being in the chain of command under which millions of innocent civilians were systematically eliminated based on the lunatic ravings of a mad man and his followers takes much more than "just because" to try to justify. Unless someone shows me evidence that the TSA employees are actually doing something illegal, immoral, unethical, or harmful to the people flying then "just following orders" is indeed good enough for me.
Being inconvenienced and getting pissed about it because you think your time is more important than the lives of the people on the plane and on the ground where it might be crashed is a sociopathic state of mind. If someone's been singled out for abusive treatment based on skin color or ancestry alone that's entirely different from random screenings.
It's not abusive, either, to pay a little more attention to young Arab men or to men with full beards. If the difference ends at asking a couple extra questions, I'm not concerned. I wear a full beard, and almost every time I go on my wife's uncle's Army base with him we get pulled aside for further checks. I'm not sure though if it's my beard or that they just enjoy searching commissioned officers' vehicles. Either way, thirty extra seconds at the gate is nothing.
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The fact that it's a bug and needs to be fixed hasn't changed. Its priority come debugging time just jumped up quite a bit because it went from a stability issue to a security issue.
Debugging is generally handled in a triage fashion. The first bugs to fix are easily exploitable remote exploits that allow arbitrary code execution with elevated privileges. Then come those that allow easy remote exploitation and arbitrary code execution at the user's restricted level. It goes on like that all the way down to a bug equivalent to "sometimes on platform X the last character of output sometimes is an extra newline that gets appended which is unnecessary".
If you have the time to make sure every piece of software you write is entirely and certifiably bug free, then that's great. Somehow, though, I imagine maintenance programming for the rest of us will probably still be prioritized based on severity.
To some extent that's true. The current generation of Macs, though, are almost entirely standards-based and use almost all off-the-shelf parts.
PCI, PCI Express, EFI, Core 2 Duo, ATX power supplies and motherboard form factor, SATA drives, USB, DVI, and 802.11b are all things other companies are free to use, including in combination with one another.
It's quite possible, as walterbyrd suggests at #23091740, that there's some small thing Apple uses that's encumbered. In that case, anyone who could figure out how to not use that little bit of patent-encumbered firmware would still be free to build a mostly identical machine.
Whether OS X would run on it unmodified might still be in question, but there's really no major change to the OS needed if it's just checking a checksum or calling an undocumented EFI extension and reading back the return value.
Amen. I agree completely.
The main trait Monsanto seems to be worried about is the "Roundup Ready" trait, although they make other GM traits, too.
The whole idea of "Roundup Ready" is that Roundup is poisonous to most grassy and grain-bearing plants, including natural soybean and corn plants. The modifications to Roundup Ready plants are so that they are not killed by Roundup along with the weeds around them.
If most of your acreage is not Roundup Ready, you're not going to suddenly start using Roundup on your fields, as it will kill your entire harvest.
If you're not using Roundup, then the Roundup Ready trait isn't doing you any good. Where's the supposed benefit to the farmer?
BTW, Monsanto has been convicted of false advertising for claiming it's biodegradable and that it leaves the soil clean after use. There are weeds out there that are becoming immune, too, so its use as a single-product herbicide may become impractical.
It's not like starting self replication at all. The plants are already doing that. Next analogy, please.
Apple specs the hardware for Macs. They write the software for Macs. They write the drivers for Mac hardware for their OS.
MS writes an OS that runs on whatever POS hardware your great aunt bought at Radio Mart for $35 on clearance. There are tens of thousands of things you could stick into the slots of that monstrosity for your great aunt, each with a driver written by the hardware manufacturer that may or may not have passed MS's tests (or even been subjected to them). MS in particular gives video drivers a lot of access, still, to the video drivers for performance reasons. It's entirely possible for NVidia's driver to crash your OS (and it sometimes does!).
People think of Macs running OS X as stable and reliable. People think of PCs running Windows as rough-edged pieces of crap. What's more, they're right but much of that is based on the hardware people use for Windows.
It's true that many people find Windows to be an inferior OS in the first place and that MS has some abusive business practices. Still, running Windows on a Dell XPS, a Sony Vaio, or a well-built quality home build with good, solid drivers is entirely different from running it on Joe's 'Puter Shack Model 2 with the $12 motherboard and $10 RAM.
You have part of the solution with your spec for a clone being written by Apple for third parties. Those third parties would have to be policed pretty heavily to make sure they're not pushing the machines as compatible with everything PC. If people think they're getting a Mac compatible and it crashes and burns just like Windows, then those people will never step up for a $3000 Mac Pro.
You are not required to buy an XBox 360 to play Halo 3. You could buy the game and rent the console. I'm not sure that even amounts to tying. IANAL, but the examples of tying I've found require that they won't let you buy the game without buying the console. That the game is only compatible with a console that you are free not to buy I'm not sure qualifies. Ask a lawyer.
Selling a single out of a pair of shoes is not the same as selling an OS without a computer or a computer without an OS. Selling an OS at retail and tying it to a particular brand of computer is the business exception, not the rule.
Considering it's an Intel processor on a mostly PC-compatible motherboard (built by Foxconn last I checked) using the EFI standard developed by Intel for their Itanium systems, Intel/ATI/NVidia graphics (PCI-E), and bog-standard DDR2 memory modules I'll hazard a guess and say no.
They do have a possibly enforceable EULA, although whether it is and to what extent is beyond my layman's legal knowledge.
They also have trademarks on "Macintosh", "iMac", "eMac", "PowerMac", "MacBook", "Mac Pro", and any number of other "Mac" and "Macintosh" derivatives as applied to computer systems. This is probably the first stop for Apple's legal department I'd look for if I was on PsyStar's legal team, but what do I know?
I think there's a good chance that PsyStar just picked up a whole lot of publicity on the cheap, and will cease and desist rather quickly after getting the request from Apple then go on selling this bargain PC as a PC.
There's an 8600GT upgrade available on the site (according to The Mac Observer -- I wasn't able to get to PsyStar's site when I tried).
There were two ways to advertise a reasonable percentage, although I think some companies just estimated.
One was, since the original PC and MS-DOS were both so simple compared to today's systems, to list the percentage of BIOS and OS API calls that produced identical output from identical input.
The other was to run an automated test of a couple hundred top-selling DOS programs and advertise the percentage which ran without compatibility issues This seems more useful, but it's much more involved and it still doesn't make as much sense from the point of view of someone using lesser known software which might make more use of the less compatible parts.
Screw the license. They are marketing a computer running OS X with "Mac" in the name. That's a violation of Apple's "Macintosh" trademark.
Well, for one, it doesn't have what Stevens wrote in that entire other two-volume set, Unix Network Programming. This had Volume 1 (originally Sockets and XTI, but I think later just Sockets), and Volume 2: Inter-Process Communications.
The great thing about sticking to Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment for what it covers is that the same guy wrote the networking stuff in those others. He also wrote 3 volumes of TCP/IP Illustrated in case you really want to dig deeply into networking.
If you want to know everything about writing networked applications for a Unix platform without a lot of overlap, or if you're the type of reader who keeps track of connections among topics better when reading one writer's style (I know a couple people like this, but I'm not sure how common a concern it is) then reading it all from Stevens will be a big help.
Stevens was, however, not writing specifically about the Linux kernel and the GNU libc. There are likely very useful tidbits to be gained from someone who is. If the book is written well, it might be better to read that than to read Stevens and the Linux man pages side by side to get up to speed.
What's specifically better for someone looking to learn C than the second edition of K&R, which covers ANSI C?
There are certainly better books for first-time programmers, but that's largely because there are better languages for first-time programmers.
As an introduction to the C language, I think the book is a good tool. As an introduction to programming, perhaps SICP, something on ocaml, or something teaching a modern C descendant like D, Objective C, or even C#.
Perl is compiled into an AST, goes through code improvements, and then is executed.
Since it typically goes through this every time you use a program from the command line, the startup time tends to be pretty heavy.
If you're using something like mod_perl or FastCGI or some other caching dispatch mechanism, your program gets dispatched without recompilation if it hasn't been changed.
If your program is long-running, then the startup cost can become negligible.
Perl's common routines are written in optimized C and with good algorithmic design in mind. If someone writes an equivalent from scratch in C instead of using a good library, then the Perl version will have been designed and refined by far more people.
It's true that in many cases C comes out well faster than Perl, but those cases are not as common as people tend to think.
What the guy you're arguing with is saying is that a farmer who didn't buy licensed and restricted seeds has every right to do with his harvest what he damn well pleases. He bought the seed, he owns or leases the land, he planted it, fertilized it, applied herbicide to the weeds around it, harvested it, and insured it against hail, fire, and drought. He owns what he takes out of the field that he grew, and he can eat it, sell it, burn it, or use it.
The guy who buys Monsanto's seeds and signs a no reseeding contract gave up some of his rights in the contract. He didn't give up his neighbor's rights, as those aren't his rights to give up.
The farmers who don't buy patented GM seeds aren't trespassing onto the land of those who do and stealing pollen. The wind (yes, wind -- corn is self-pollinating or wind-pollinated as often as pollinated by bees) or bees do that naturally. The unnatural pollen many farmers consider dangerous crud actually invades non-GM farms and perverts their botanically hybridized crops. For that, should Monsanto be the plaintiff or the defendant?
If Monsanto is so concerned about their unnatural crops cross-pollinating other corn and beans, then they should GM it to keep it from doing that. It's not the fault of people trying to avoid it that the wind blows.
That's like running over a kid in a crosswalk while the walk sign is lit and suing the kid for being there because he dented your car. The kid's doing what he's supposed to do, you're infringing on his space, and then you blame him. That's what Monsanto is doing.
They've timed this to fairly well coincide with a new processor design that promises better performance than what they've had to date. Hopefully not just drivers but optimizations for their CPU will take off in maturity alongside the growth of their deployed footprint.
... "At least planetary systems like ours might be more common than previously thought over that direction, 5,000 years ago, at around the distance from us that light would take 5,000 years to get here. Or maybe somebody's holding up a distorted mirror 2,500 light years away. We're not really sure. Some scientist said we're discovering more than we used to, now that we're confident that we can detect them and bother looking. That must mean the spike in data is representative."
/. geek. I doubt, though, that thinking in general about the number of multi-planet systems has changed drastically because of this one system. Like most science reporting in the mainstream press, this is oversimplified and overhyped.
I'm looking hopefully forward to giving people directions by system name and planet number just as much as the next
Routing sometimes works like that. If the routing table gets hosed or certain lines are down, you'll be able to get some places and not others.
It's possible Comcast was screwing you, but it's possible they were just screwing the pooch.
No, no, no. A "klatu barata nikto charge" would keep customers from destroying their offices, not encourage it.
Very few sane ISPs route to ranges that are reserved by the RFCs. It creates extra traffic on failures if they do.
It's also bad to have a reserved address space attacking your other customers in a reserved address space across town. I had to set my own firewall up to drop 10/8, 172.16/12, and 192.168/16 addresses from the public side of my router when I had Insight Broadband (now owned by Comcast) because the cable-to-ethernet bridge would allow others to access my 10/8 (actually, 10.0.0/22) network I had set up. There's no reason to pass that.
AT&T does a host not reachable on 2.2.2.2 on the fourth hop from my box (my router, DSLAM, distribution router, aggregation router). Why should it try to store route information on something that's not going to be routable anyway?
If Comcast is sending back RST packets instead of ICMP messages, that's odd. It's not, however, provably evil.
Why the SSH connection is denied (unless Comcast bans all listening services, as some consumer-oriented ISP plans do) is far more interesting.
It is indeed a Microsoft host, as a whois check on ARIN tells me. It's also a host with no valid PTR record, so that's pretty good evidence the far end is screwed. How the hell hard is it to generate valid PTR records?
It also happens that ICMP ping requests are dropped at Microsoft's end and that a traceroute has a missing hop in it on Microsoft's end. Those are not controlled by Comcast, because I'm testing from AT&T.
As for the reserved addresses, it's not uncommon for a router to do a hard deny on packets destined for RFC-reserved IP address ranges. It keeps the rest of the network from having to route traffic to nowhere and back, and propagating the failure messages. A better check would be to try a known nonexistent address in a valid range.
These things don't mean Comcast doesn't suck. It just means the analysis could have been a bit better.
The ssh connection does look fishy, though.
I'm not a Verizon customer, but my buddy and I did notice that our PTR records switched from .dsl. to .lightspeed. and that AT&T has spray-painted "Fiber DTC" on the streets and sidewalks near the CO here several weeks ago. Those are pretty good clues that we're getting something soon.
Sure enough, the talk radio station said the other day that AT&T PR reps had said that fiber-to-the-customer is well on its way.
That's the thing. If they're more useful, they'll be recruited more heavily. If they're recruited more heavily, they'll tend to make up a larger portion of the group.
There might be something to the idea that engineers and terrorists think somewhat alike, but there are much simpler explanations which cannot be discounted. When you can't discount a simpler explanation, you don't make the leap to the more spectacular reasoning unless you're looking to sensationalize the topic.
That engineers plan things well should be no surprise. Engineers as a group design everything from bridges to sports stadiums to computer chips. They try to find a good balance of expected average need, overbuild and contingency performance, and cost.
That both the terrorists and those fighting the terrorists would want chemical, electrical, structural, and electronics engineers for their specific areas of expertise alone should come as no surprise. That they're also found to be good planners in general is only slightly less obvious.
The assumption that all engineers are similar to terrorists I think is a stretch.
To say the reason for the action is as suspect is to say that the action itself is as suspect. If there's not a similar action, then the reasoning behind the actions are not held to as close scrutiny.
Taking a swim just for fun instead of specifically for exercise or for survival doesn't need to be explained. Being in the chain of command under which millions of innocent civilians were systematically eliminated based on the lunatic ravings of a mad man and his followers takes much more than "just because" to try to justify. Unless someone shows me evidence that the TSA employees are actually doing something illegal, immoral, unethical, or harmful to the people flying then "just following orders" is indeed good enough for me.
Being inconvenienced and getting pissed about it because you think your time is more important than the lives of the people on the plane and on the ground where it might be crashed is a sociopathic state of mind. If someone's been singled out for abusive treatment based on skin color or ancestry alone that's entirely different from random screenings.
It's not abusive, either, to pay a little more attention to young Arab men or to men with full beards. If the difference ends at asking a couple extra questions, I'm not concerned. I wear a full beard, and almost every time I go on my wife's uncle's Army base with him we get pulled aside for further checks. I'm not sure though if it's my beard or that they just enjoy searching commissioned officers' vehicles. Either way, thirty extra seconds at the gate is nothing.