The Hacker Manifesto by The Mentor

Summary:
The Hacker Manifesto is a short, but very clear and meaningful statement of the place of the hacker culture in our society, and the frequent mislabeling of hackers. It tells us that a hacker is not necessarily someone that spends their nights breaking into your computer and stealing your identity. While this is something that some people that fall under the definition of a hacker do occasionally do, hackers are generally people that simply change things in a system in order to make them suit their needs or just to make them work better. They are the people that define their lives by the computer and what they can do with them. They are generally the people writing the software that we take for granted and use daily. They were the people that our schools rejected and misunderstood, but now they are some of the people that we most depend on.
The author, “The Mentor”, or Loyd Blankenship is presumably a hacker that is explaining very concisely who it is that become “hackers”. Being someone who has found this article in the past, I would think that his intended audience is the person who is interested in hacker culture, and is mildly knowledgeable with computers. His stake in making these statements is to address the psychology and general societal misunderstanding of hackers and their motives. He wrote this manifesto after being arrested, so I assume it was in protest of this.


Inquiry:
My personal view of a hacker is not one of accusation or suspicion but something more along the line of reverence. I consider myself of fair intelligence, but the complexity of the systems that hackers understand, manipulate, and live for is sometimes mind-boggling to me. One of the most impressive things is that the best of them do it for fun, doing as a hobby things that are nowhere near the comprehension of the vast majority of the population. And even with all of the social stigma that comes with the term “hacker”, they are one of the unseen cornerstones of our digital society, often being the ones developing our computer software. In this respect I totally agree with The Hacker Manifesto when it says that hackers are misunderstood because they are above the social norms and limitations.
Questions:
1) What is your take on the term “hacker”? Do you personally assign it a negative connotation? Why or why not? When you think of a “hacker” what mental image comes to mind?
2) At the end of the Manifesto, it mentions using services without paying because it is run by “profiteering gluttons” (i.e. downloading software, music). Do you think that actions like this should be considered criminal? As Stallman also pushed for; should people be allowed to limit the distribution of intellectual property like software?
3) The Manifesto mentions that hackers are all alike. What is your take on this position? Do you see hacker culture as a sea of anonymous nerds all working independently towards a similar goal like The Mentor does, or a defocused group of digital delinquents?