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TANSTAAFL
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TANSTAAFL /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's
classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".] "There Ain't No
Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking
at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight
technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software,
or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet
newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database
back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well,
TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to
the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political
libertarians in hackerdom (see A Portrait of J. Random
Hacker in Appendix B).
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