On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 2013-03-15 at 18:47 -0400, Doug wrote:
> On 03/15/2013 06:25 PM, Frank Murphy wrote:
> > On Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:21:07 -0700
> > Richard Vickery <richard.vickeryrv@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Does this mean that you just let them adulterate the term?
> > You would have to re-write current popular culture.
> > Language and it's use change, by it's very usage.
> >
> Language is fickle. Gay used to mean happy-go-lucky;
> nuke used to mean to drop an atom bomb on; transistor
> still is a three-wire device made (usually) of silicon, used
> for amplifiers and switches, but in common usage it means
> a radio; nice was once pejorative.  And we used to have
> "gotten" and, a little earlier, "shaven" but our verbs are
> regularizing themselves whether we like it or not.
> So whether you like it or not, hack usually connotes
> unlawful intrusion on a computer. Ce la vie!

I think you mean "C'est la vie", ...

Anyway, I still refer to talented programmers as hackers in a
non-perjorative sense because there isn't a good one-word alternative.
Geeks doesn't cut it because there are lots of geeks who don't program.

If the lame ducks don't want to take back the term, that is their problem. If you are going to let Bill Gates and the Microshit team abuse the term after they abused end-users with a piece-of-crap OS that didn't work in '98 and still doesn't work. I refuse to let it be. I am a hacker, and if the police come up to me as some kind of criminal, I will make sure that they know the difference between someone who goes in to make a money transaction at a bank and one with the intent to rob a bank and take lives. There is nothing wrong with the term hacker; we all do it, and we have been hacking the kernel and computers and helping each other with broken networks for 70 years. I am not about to change just because some idiot dropped out of law school, bought Windows, and decided to give us a bad name, and call us all criminals, just because we tried to help him.