:rolleyes: Nobody’s calling you a criminal, you dope (uh, oh, are you going to get offended that I called you marijuana?). Words can have more than one meaning. And despite your anal-retentive protestations, the word “hacker”, while it can specifically mean “programmer” (or variations on that), it can also be used to refer to someone who “hacks” into computers he’s not supposed to. Go look up “hacker” on your own cite, and see that that’s listed. Yes, it’s listed as deprecated, and that doesn’t mean squat. The meanings of words don’t just retroactively disappear when someone decides they’re “wrong” (the irony here is that many people whose asses share your particular stick are also hell-bent on insisting that the archaic meaning of the word “geek” is the only correct one, because they don’t like being referred to as circus freaks. Some folks never pass up a chance for some righteous indignation).
“Hacker” has both meanings, and at some point, some dork who probably resembles the love child of Richard Stallman and Eric S Raymond got tired of explaining that he was “not that kind of hacker” to yet another person who didn’t understand the distinction, and started the movement to seperate the definitions into two words. As a result, we have a whole class of bigoted white people who are eventually going to have to get tired of explaining that they’re “not that kind of cracker” and invent their own word. It’s stupid and pointless, and completely avoidable if people can summon the cranial capacity to cope with words that sound the same but mean something different (I was going to use the big word for this but I started to hear protestations of “but I have lots of gay friends” in my head and decided against it).
So shut the fuck up and go back to reminding people to put a ™ after “UNIX” or something.
ntucker, I’ll ignore your insults and say that hackers were here first, we invented the term to describe people like us, and it was the mass media that corrupted it and forced us to invent a word for people who should, in a sane world, just be called criminals.
Case in point: Do you call someone a nigger if they’ve displayed an aversion to that term? Do you refer to someone as a honkey or a spic if they’ve said those are the wrong words to use? Do you tell them they’re fighting a losing battle when they react to insults? Why or why not?
Is it because of common decency? Why, then do I not deserve that?
Just for that sanctimonious and ludicrous drivel (a negative use of “hacker” is equivalent to “nigger”, now?), I will INSIST on referring to the Al-Jazeera hackers as, well, hackers.
Of course, what they did was reprehensible. Adding a small pro-coalition blurb to the page without disturbing its other content would have sufficed.
Basically, anyone that attempts to impede my free access to any type of information that I wish to seek out is a fuck. If you don’t like what Al-Jazeera is saying, fine and dandy. Put up a counterpoint website of your own. This act, to me, is on the same slippery slope as book burning.
I’m also quite sick of maligning the perfectly benevolent group of people who are hackers simply because a bunch of destructive vandal criminal bastards known as crackers want to be talked about on the 11 o’clock news.
Bryan, aren’t you being just a little childish? Fine. I can do that, too.
Bryan, you are a doper. By that I mean you use pot to excess. I will not entertain any notions that doper might have a correct meaning that isn’t an insult.
Phil, there’s a world of difference between getting a job done and taking down a website you don’t own. (Unless you are the FBI, natch.) Impeding the free flow of information is not a hackerly trait.
Chalk me up on the side of “you’re fighting a losing battle against common usage.” Like calling a man “gay” in order to describe him as carefree and lighthearted, the benevolent “hacker” designation is going the way of the dinosaur. Deal with it.
And the Al-Jazeera hackers don’t deserve a beer. The guys who defaced the RIAA website awhile back, now THOSE are guys who deserve a beer.
I’d be willing to bet that Bryan doesn’t say “I’m a Doper” outside of the SDMB community, beause no one would know what the hell he meant.
Hey, if the insular world of computer programmers wants to cling to a different definition of a word, fine. Just don’t get upset when the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit.
Are you for real here? There is a fight about “hacker” vs. “cracker”? How’s about we call you all geeks? Is that cool, or is geek now the equivalent of nigger. Won’t someone please think of the children?
It strikes me to be along the same lines as book-burning.
I am genuinely curious about how things are being protrayed to the millions of AJ viewers. I don’t understand Arabic, so I was overjoyed to find out that they were going to have an english web presence.
None of this has anything to do with my perception of the validity of AJ as a news source. Until I get a chance to see it for myself I’m not comfortable making a judgement about that.
The contentions about AJ’s journalistic values are pretty much non-issues/ hijaks.
Heck, I don’t even say “I’m a Doper” within the SDMB community because, frankly, it sounds kinda stupid. It’s not a particularly euphonious label and I’m unlikely to use it under any conditions.
I don’t like to call myself a Trekkie, either, though many of my Café posts could easily get me labelled as such. But at least I’m never going to equate “Trekkie” with a racial slur. I mean, puh-leeze.
Yeah, there is. Here’s a link to a relevant thread at temporary SDMB. Tuba set those boards up for us after this site was hacked. Sorry, Derleth, but you’re bailing an ocean with a thimble. Besides, “cracker” already means “white person, especially one from Georgia.” I doubt your average person is going to associate it with malicious computer activity any time soon.
Sorry man, I think we lost this fight a long time ago. The negative definition has been ensconced in the minds of so many people, I have to be careful about the contexts in which I use “hack” or “hacker”. And when I have to run an internal check before I use a word, it sucks.
Geek is OK but it’s really more general than ‘hacker’ which is a kind of subset of geek whose interests generally lie to the computer security or operating system code modification (as in ‘I hacked my linux kernel last night.’)
Get a grip. About the time you start comparing your wearying position on the hacker / cracker appellations with such racist name calling, you need a break from the computer. Go hack something. Better yet, try this: do a web search for ‘hackers’ and see if it turns up a laundry list of superior net citizens or juvenile mischief-makers. Could you do Uncle Waverly a favor, and just choose a new freakin’ term for whatever it is you think you do and not resurrect this debate every time it comes up?
Are you trying to make your case or fight it? Your offense over alternate meanings for the word “hacker” is a direct parallel to this ridiculous scenario you’ve just provided. You’re offended because you refuse to entertain any notions that “hacker” might have a correct meaning other than the one you identify with.
