KOBAYASHI MARU

From the Star Trek movies. To beat or avoid a no-win scenario by cheating. Also refers to a really nasty kludge or patch that breaks the rules of good programming. Example: Yeah, the project's on schedule...i just pulled a Kobayashi Maru on the due dates Yeah he pulled a Kobayashi on the network problem, he just swapped out all of the hardware. She pulled a Maru on that buggered sockets API. She just wrote her own TCP stacks in the application