Where have all the "real" hackers gone?

A real hacker is a special kind of person. I'm not talking about the idiot crackers and script-kiddies that break in to networks and who turn your neighboor's great-aunt's computer into a spyware-infested, slower-than-cold-tar bot-net slave. While I'm not in the same hacking universe as a "real" hacker (people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, etc...), I like to think of myself as a budding hacker. If I want to learn about something, I start digging through the documentation, source code, whatever I can find. When I see something cool in a website, I'll take a look at the source and see if I can figure out how it works. When I discovered an un-implemented feature in the port of my favorite text editor to Apple's Cocoa Framework, I started going through the source to find where I need to add the code that will make it work. (this got side-shelved by the demands of school, but I'll finish it off this summer)

Part of this is a natural curiosity for how things work. Part of it is the fact that I now have the knowledge to make some semblance of sanity of quite a lot of the 1's and 0's that make the world run these days (given time to look through it).

Given this curiosity, when I got to work today to see everyone gathered around my buddy's computer, I naturally came over to see what was going on. Much to my surprise, it turns out that some lazy-assed idiot has cloned Justin's extremely slick, one-of-a-kind website. (trust me, it actually _is_ one-of-a-kind). Not cloned as in copied the source code, modified it so it's the same but different. Not cloned as in copied the whole thing to his own server and replaced images, blurbs, etc. with his own material. Cloned as in sucking the content off of Justin's server, changing the font, and translating the blurbs to Spanish. Cloned as in using the exact same javascript file from its location on Justin's server. Justin is in the middle of some "minor retaliation", so don't be surprised if there is a little "addition" to the slacker's page if you go look at it. And don't be surprised, Mr. Sebastian Lazy-pants if your web presence takes a turn for the worse... There's an amusing little anecdote to this here.

What the heck? What ever happened to, "gee, I wonder how that works...", or, "hmm, I wonder what I could do with that..." ???? If you're going to go through the trouble of copy/cloning somebody's work, it's not that much trouble to learn how it works and make it your own, with a little note saying, "Thanks to Justin for the ideas".

I just can't understand that way of thinking...