>>> Yup, a bunch of 14 year olds in their mom's basements who want to be
>>> hackers without knowing the first thing about it.
>
>> Required CAD quote: http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20030606
>
>    OTOH, how do you define "hacking"?

I think the necessary criterion is that it's any activity requiring 
technical knowledge and skill.

Once time I fed a program into my GPU which made it render volumetric 
fog, with realtime computed gas motion. That's very technical and 
impressive. However, since I didn't actually /write/ that code, nor have 
any comprehension for how it even works, that doesn't count as hacking. 
All I did was download a file and run it. That requires little to no 
technical skill on my part.

I suppose it's a bit like saying what counts as "writing a book"? Does 
the book actually have to be /published/? Does it still count if the 
book doesn't get published? How big does the document have to be to 
count as a "book"? Because, hey, I've written lengthy discussions on 
stuff. But does that count as "writing a book"?

>    Is fixing someone's PC by running scandisk "hacking"?

And then of course, in everyday culture "hacking" refers only to 
technical activities which are in some way /illegal/. :-P

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