16 lines
884 B
Plaintext
16 lines
884 B
Plaintext
TANSTAAFL
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/tanstahfl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The Moon is a
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Harsh Mistress. ] There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch , often invoked
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when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight
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technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the
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signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. What? Don't tell me
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I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to
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work! Well, TANSTAAFL you know. This phrase owes some of its popularity to
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the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in
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hackerdom (see Appendix B for discussion). Outside hacker circles the
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variant TINSTAAFL ( There is No Such Thing... ) is apparently more common,
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and can be traced back to 1952 in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen.
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TANSTAAFL may well have arisen from it by mutation.
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