What's a hacker

People who prattle on defending "the true meaning of hacker" now irritate me even more than people who use the word incorrectly. The overwhelming majority of people don't know the difference between a hacker and a cracker, and perhaps more importantly, they don't care. It's over, you lost, the media won, choose another moniker for yourself. How about "amateur computer scientist" (unless you do it for a living in which case you should probably be calling yourself a computer scientist in the first place)?