As far as I know there is no national accreditation body for the title in the US.
I'm not a PE but I still call myself a software engineer on everything except government forms. As far as the government's concerned I'm a programmer.
I don't think so. It's been a bit since I read up on Visa stuff (and I imagine it doesn't matter to you as an American citizen) but there are distinctions between programmer / software developer / etc.
1. (note the "software" in the list of exams offered) http://ncees.org/engineering/pe/
Heck, you can have a job title of Software Engineer without even having graduated college.
If you wrote an article on cardiology, and you said 'I am a doctor' but you hadn't kept your medical license current, then it would be a false claim, regardless of the fact that your article on cardiology was 100% true. Asserting a privileged status that you do not hold misleads people who rely on the licensure system as a proxy for performing due diligence.
Professionalism is about more than whether people are willing to pay you or not. It involves commitment to uphold particular standards even if it is not in your personal interest to do so.
This is not an attack on math and science no matter how much you want to see it that way. If he had been frank about his amateur status from the outset hew would have had no problem. getting it wrong without bad intentions is nothing serious either, but after he was warned and agreed to abide by the state code, he had no excuse to repeat the behavior.
You can come up with the most interesting scientific result in history, but that does not give you an automatic right to have your discovery implemented by others, does it?
without?