Criminal charges for expressing your opinion is another.
An airplane pilot is licensed and will talk trash w/ people about flying and not get in trouble unless they express an opinion like ‘i love to drink a six pack before I get in the cockpit’.
Other people say what they want about aviation and unless it is something like ‘I used this one weird trick to smuggle a sniper rifle past the X ray backscatter machine’ or ‘kewl! I jammed the gps on a plane and saw the coordinates change on ads-b’ you won’t face criminal charges.
There was a day when Wilhelm Reich was sent to jail and L. Ron Hubbard exiled at sea. Today, it seems almost impossible to face criminal charges for bogus health information.
> Criminal charges for expressing your opinion is another.
Being a paid expert witness is different than “expressing your opinion.” It’s one thing to be subpoenaed and compelled to testify and another to swear and speak authoritatively. Expert testimony “opinion” could result in people going to jail, or in this case paying large sums of money.
I imagine a case of medical malpractice where an unlicensed doctor was expertly testifying as to the proper procedure. That seems inappropriate.
Yes, though I wonder whether this couldn't be handled better? Courts are already organized as an adversarial system:
So let the lawyers bring in whatever supposed experts they can find, and let the lawyers from the other side poke holes at their credentials? Same procedure as with eyewitnesses, which are not usually licensed.
Some people want software engineering to be like other engineering disciplines where a PE license and/or union membership is mandatory to practice the trade.
I think you find most of those people do not have any intentions of bringing meaningful value to the engineering disciplines. It's just a business opportunity to them.
In the 1980s there was a proposal in the California legislature to license software engineers. They basically took an EE-related test (developed by the IEEE, little surprise) and stirred some software in there. I don't remember what software methodology flavor-of-the-month they rubberstamped, but I assure you that it was forgettable.
It was a bare-faced, rent-seeking money grab from some entrenched licensing board. I mean, I've used Ohm's Law in my software career, and I've made smoke come out of things on a professional basis. But it's hardly necessary for a security engineer to know about impedance matching.
