Doesn't TLA mean three-letter-acronym?

Someone mentioned how they use "TLA" for some type of analysis. Cool! What is that? Doesn't TLA mean "three-letter-acronym"? Maybe it's the "Temporal Logic of Actions" by Lamport? Maybe it's text-mining and link-analysis, which has no Wikipedia page? In this conversation either could have been right. At the time I felt dumb for not knowing what TLA is.

Maybe the best policy is to avoid acronyms in general? Example: "Isn't it amazing how Hyper Text Markup Language pages with Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script can use hardware acceleration from the Graphic Processing Unit these days?" Hrm... that's a bit long.

How about this: Let's all spell out technology acronyms when we mention them for the fist time. If I do this when talking to you, it's not because I think you're stupid. If you do this to me, I won't be offended. We can skip any acronyms that have an about.com page (where the how-to on clip art is considered "tech").