Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project,
Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret
documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a
hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock
picking kit. (He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)

It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would want to do such
things. Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for
breaking into computers. This had only recently been declared a crime, and the
FBI found that their usual investigative technique didn't work. Police
investigation apparently begins with a motive. The usual motives are few:
drugs, money, sex, revenge. Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives
on the FBI's list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them.

    -- Paul Graham
    -- The Word "Hacker" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html )

  <Teratogen>  Two atoms are walking down the street when one of them says
               "I think I've lost an electron." The second one says "are
               you sure?", to which the first one replies "Yes, I'm
               positive".
 <mpeg4codec>  So officer Schroedinger pulls over this quantum particle
               and he says ``Do you know how fast you were going?''
 <mpeg4codec>  the particle says, ``No, but I know exactly where I am.''
  <Teratogen>  everybody has heard of Schroedinger's cat experiment
  <Teratogen>  but very few people know that Schroedinger hated cats
  <Teratogen>  with a passion
  <Teratogen>  and actually experimented on them
  <Teratogen>  he even owned a set of cat-fur gloves
  <Teratogen>  cats mysteriously disappeared around Schroedinger's
               laboratory
  <Teratogen>  and there was no Chinese restaurant close by to explain the
               disappearances
 <mpeg4codec>  Schroedinger's cat: wanted dead AND alive

    -- Jokes about Particle Physics
    -- #perl, Freenode