analog

Firstly, you are saying that since child porn is a type of porn, that saying a person is guilty of "porn" is the same thing since it's a "subcategory". That's flawed logic to a point I can't measure.

Second, crackers are not hackers. They do two completely different things with completely different agendas and intentions. That's like saying a person who illegally puts graffiti on the side of a building and a person who paints a wonderful mural on the side of a building are doing the same job because they both put some paint on a wall. That's asinine, and it's why "graffiti" and "painting" are two different words. Just because people don't know better not to call one the other, doesn't mean the words are evolving. It means that a large portion of the population is clueless to the difference. How many people do you think there are that don't know the difference between a neutron, electron, and proton? Or a quark? That doesn't mean they're the same thing, or deserve to be squeezed together into one easy-to-digest word for the masses.

Language is fluid and "adjusts" because, over time, new words are used in place of old ones, colloquialisms become part of the language at large, and new words are added to describe things we didn't have or didn't understand and categorize previously.

The pervasive misuse of "hacker" has nothing to do with any of that. Incorrectly using "hacker" when you mean "cracker" is due to a lack of education on the matter. *edited* We're not talking about evolving vernacular, we're talking about people using the wrong word because they don't know better.*/edited*

I, like many others in this thread, gave up a long time ago on this cause... but to say that it's language fluidity, evolution, or anything other than misuse due to lack of knowledge, is foolish and incorrect.