Re Engineering

Where i live, re-engineering means reviewing the design of an old product taking into account new technology, new materials, new production processes etc, and trying to improve it.

Reverse engineering means copying a product, but intelligently, understanding the intent of the original designer. Cheating, actually.

Not true in all situations. Reverse engineering can be used as well for new products to avoid an already used path. It can save a lot of lab work since it gives the possibility to define allowable limits for different parameters in the situations the investigated product worked. It is not cheating if you do not build same product as investigated one. To give you an example: ALL car manufacturers buy and disassembly cars from other manufacturers, ALL plane manufacturers do same. IC engines are tested on the rigs and results are analysed as for own products. In the machine tool branch a lot of competitor's research has been done to understand the why and how with main goal NOT to copy but to do BETTER.

Also Reverse Engineering software. Crackers do it to bypass Software Activation\Registration Mechanisms, i.e get the software for free. Check out OllyDBG if its the software side your interested in.