I was looking around at the movies coming up and looked into "The Social Network" which led me to Wikipedia for Mark Zuckerberg.
Once upon a time, I wrote a book about how computers work -- meant for the everyday person and trying to explain/show how the various parts of computers worked together. Although unpublished (and probably unnecessary anymore), one of the chapters dealt with hackers. According to Wikipedia, Zuckerberg said that hackers are people who aren't afraid to break something in order to make it better.
Personally, I would go a bit further. I would say that hackers are people who are curious about how software works, aren't afraid to break it, and who want to make it better (in the past, this often meant more efficient and faster, nowadays it more often means more features). At any rate, it is a positive purpose -- Bill Gates Jr., Wozniak (also a hardware tinkerer), and others are all hackers. I am also a hacker and proud of it.
So, why does the word "hacker" have such a negative connotation? Leave it to the sound bite. It sounds good and the media, rather than going into more detail as to what was actually done (which might bore a majority of their viewers/readers) just lumped all people working on software as hackers. This includes a sub-group of hackers which does NOT have such benevolent motives -- the "crackers". Crackers work to exploit the inherent weaknesses of software structure to allow misuse.
Crackers are a pain in the rear -- they do things for their own egos and pocketbooks and make the rest of us have to deal with their behavior. Hackers have made the fusionfalls (a current favorite of my kids), the facebooks, the Linuxes, and the spreadsheets possible (among thousands of other software programs). Hackers have found a home in the open source community but, for the most part, remain in individual obscurity.
