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.