Some thoughts on what the word means:
It's changed over the years.. in the early 80s, a hacker was a programmer who knew their computer inside out, so they could do anything they wanted, not what they were supposed to be doing. I had a computer with a Z80, and read a series called "The Hacker's Handbook" which featured stuff like inserting little machine language routines into the comments of your BASIC program so you could do whatever you wanted, and very fast. Later I wrote assembler routines, hand-translated them to machine code and inserted them into Turbo Pascal functions. That definitely counted as hacking then..
Reading Kevin Mitnick's books, he could do almost anything programmer-hackers can do, and a lot more besides, just by making a few phone calls, and by knowing a lot about the organizations/systems/codes/protocols/authorizations involved.
Sprite of spritesmods.com says "I'm an avid hacker...I enjoy ripping different pieces of hardware apart and using them in a way they weren't meant to use"
The popular sense of the word today is more like.. a criminal, breaking laws and stealing from people and organizations with their bash expertise.
