>>8
When I use the term hacker, I use it in the sense of people who can come up with a cleaver solution for a problem, or just interesting concepts put into action, and hacking being the activity of said hacker. It doesn't have to be about coding per se, but more of finding cleaver uses of the environment around you.
My problem is more of this, "OH MAN, SOCIETY CAN'T HOLD ME DOWN, BECAUSE THEY ARE YOUR RULES NOT MINE!!!" and all they know is turning on SSH on their friends macbook. Then suddenly they are game changing rebels against society and self proclaimed "hackers".
While some of the tenants of great hackers is ignoring the rules, and all that jazz. I find that back then, your mentioned MIT days, it was truly finding solutions around really real problems. Phone phreaking would be an example, and it wasn't from the stance that "I'm a criminal... and on society is blah blah blah", it was that long distance calls where fucking expensive, and if I wanted to connect to my favorite BBS I'm not paying $200 a month. In the 80's there were some really interesting ideas coming up, and those people were hackers in every sense of the word. It wasn't because they had some agenda, and acting like a bunch of emo 16 year olds. It was because they wanted to do something, and they fucking did it.
I'm not trying to say that it's dead either and the 80's were some great era or whatever. Look at the people who came up with torrenting, those are some true hackers. Anywho... I think you can sort of get my drift on what about that post made me cringe a little.