[andyv]

Since the girl is a person and not a thing, it should be "... girl who hacked hbgary". r11t copied the mistake from Forbes-- How do national magazines make grammatical errors like this? Don't these people have editors who at least earned a passing grade in middle school English?

[jemfinch]

Shakespeare wrote in the Merchant of Venice of "the man that hath no music in himself". Mark Twain wrote a short story titled "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg". Ira Gershwin wrote a popular song titled "The Man that Got Away". These are just the examples easily available on Wikipedia.

Your complaint does not represent majority usage in English, let alone modern usage.

[syllogism]

Mostly because that's not really a grammatical error:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=girl+that,girl+wh...

Middle school English teachers love to invent simple rules of the language that don't reflect actual usage very well. The choice between "that" and "who" as relativisers is subtle, and the animacy constraint doesn't explain the facts of how people speak.

[tedunangst]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_relative_clauses

1) usage is disputed at a level beyond middle school English.

2) "that" is often preferred for restrictive clauses.

[burgerbrain]

"andyv, the man that knows little about modern grammar."

Oh the horror.