@Khaptain(was: Re: R@ Fluffy Bunny (was: e: We need a better term than "hacking"))
You write: "I am not sure that the electronics engineers at IBM,Intel,Motorola etc would agree with that phrase"
I am absolutely certain that they would. See (in situ, from Mon 29 Dec 2003 10:35:02 AM PST, no less):
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Much earlier, when I was at Stanford, early one Saturday morning a Grad student drove to Berkeley on his motorcycle & came back with tapes of the over-night build of 3BSD. Our Professor, visiting from DARPA for a couple weeks/months (a dude by the name of Cerf, you may have heard of him), wondered how the hell our VAX had the latest version of BSD already running (10AM-ish), when the Switched56 connected source code system hadn't completed the download of the source, much less started to compile it.
Biker's answer: "My motorcycle's latency might be sub-par, but it still has a much higher bandwidth capability than your network!". Cerf's reply? "Nice hack!" (Note that a variation of this quote is often attributed to Tanenbaum in 1996, but it was a fairly common meme around 1980.)