You should try actually working with people outside of academia and you will quickly learn that just because there degree says "engineer" on it doesn't make them an engineer. You will learn the converse to be true as well. I've encountered people with physics degrees and computer science degrees hold "engineering-type" positions who I would say were actual engineers compared to people who were really nothing more than "paper" engineers.

Something tells me you've never seen the curriculums for undergraduate software engineering degrees. They're computer science degrees with mandatory software management courses thrown in replacing what would've been elective courses in Computer Sceince. At least in the States they are. Nothing about the curriculums make them more "engineering-like" than Computer Science. Unless my CS program just happened to be more "engineering-like" compared to everybody else. Perhaps ABET accreditation makes all the difference.

I'm a programmer and I don't play games any more :(. Not sure what happened. In college, I damn near flunked out because I played Quake too much. But ever since I started working professionally (10 years now), I simply don't have the motivation to load up a game and play it.

University is not trade school. You go there to get educated. If all you know is one narrow field, then you can hardly call yourself educated.

You can do what I did and take the general ed classes at the local community college, then just transfer the credits in. A lot cheaper that way.

And out of all the general ed classes you need to take, I'd have to say the English 101 class is the most important. It's just down right embarrassing to claim that you are educated, but can't even write a coherent paper. And yes, you do that a lot in the professional world. Or in more general, you need to be able to communicate effectively. I know this one senior developer who said one of the best developers he's ever had was a guy whose degree wasn't in CS or related field but in English. And it was simply because he was knew how to communicate his thoughts in a clear and effective manner. His code might not have been as tight and efficient as a CS guy, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn't matter as much as being able to write clear and maintainable code.

Who knows, you might actually enjoy some of those non-CS classes. I know I liked the critical thinking class I took to fulfill a humanities credit. That surprised me because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have signed up for a class like that if I wasn't forced to pick something.

VC2010's debugger allows breakpoints in lambdas. Just sayin' ...

Dunno about you, but I find lambda's extremely useful. It lets me use Boost's signals and slots without using that butt ugly boost bind() function. I also like using them to do nested functions like you could in Pascal. The new overloaded meaning for the auto keyword is also a pretty awesome addition. The compiler I use the most these days (VC 2010) doesn't do typesafe enums yet, but I see myself using that a lot when it comes too.

I put a Linux box with an SSH server and rsync on my FIOS line. Then I use rsync for Android to sync file shares between the Linux box and my Android tablet. This has been working fine for me. It might even be more secure than Dropbox.

When someone says "American", normal people that have at least two brain cells to rub together don't think "Canadian", "Mexican", "Brazilian", "Peruvian", "Haitian", or whatever country that happen to exist here on the American continents. They think "citizen of the U.S.". A person who refers to us as "USians" might think he's being clever, but in reality to everybody else he just looks like a gigantic douche bag. Jokes on him. I hope he doesn't do that in real life in front of strangers.

A person is an engineer because of what he does, not because some piece of paper says he is.

I believe some places up in Canada are now doing PE certifications for Software Engineering as well. Last time I researched this, I believe Texas was going to do the same thing for some reason failed. But PE certs for SE will be coming in not too distant future. Will that finally shut up the "software engineers are not real engineers" crowd? Probably not. I find the kind of people who even make such complaints are usually "paper engineers" anyway and haven't done any actual real work "in the field" and their entire self esteem is built on having a degree that says "engineer" on it. IMHO, just because your degree says "engineer" on it doesn't make you a "real" engineer either. After working in the field for about 7 years, with many different kinds of engineers, I have to say I've met quite a few "paper engineers" during that time.

ABET recognizes Software Engineering as a legitimate engineering field. Just sayin'...

#define REAL_ENGINEER

Sounds like you're trying to use the Flash Authoring Tool to make apps. Learn about Flex. They address all of your points:

a) actually, I don't know about this ... if you like Eclipse then you'll like Flex Builder
b) Like JavaScript, ActionScript 3 is based on ECMAScript. Therefore, it's not a big leap to learn AS3.
c) The Flex SDK is free. Flex Builder is, of course, not free ... but last I checked, it wasn't outrageously expensive when compared to other commercial development tools (Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.).

Not quite. This Flash app I developed looks slightly differently under Linux than it does under Windows. So much for looking the same everywhere; you still have to test.