Normally I loathe acronyms because so often they are completely unnecessary and merely allow the author to be a little bit lazier and make things more difficult for their audience to understand. Scientists and Engineers have a habit of using complicated techinical words to make themselves seem smarter and to exclude otherwise intelligent people when in fact their inability to explain the more complex words in simpler ways shows their lack of intelligence. Computer Science is something that is "easy when you know how" but has a very steep learning curve until you eventually do figure things out, so it is particularly annoying when people needlessly complicate subjects with pointless acronyms and horde some piece of knownledge because they got there first. Sometimes I have cringed with embarassment at the tragic comedy of lecturers going on at great length to do little more than expand acronyms and explain moderately complicated English words.
Despite all that there are times when acronyms can be used effectively. Terms like Laser, Radar and Scuba are all fairly easily pronouncable and have come to stand on their own so much so that people are hard pressed to explain what they stand for (and even in the case of Scuba, Aqua Lung is a far more expressive term).
The reason I mention this is that in the Sunday newspapers I read about a survey by Novell about managing business security. They describe two signficant categories of people who are the cause of many security problems and they manage to do so using memorable acronyms that both describe the behaviours of these groups and serve as a memorable metaphor at the same time. One group was described as Apathetic Non-Techinical Staff (ANTS), the other group (with a slightly more contrived acronym) was described as Busy Empolyees Endangering Security (BEES). Having seen those attitudes before I was well impressed that someone was able to sum up the problem in so clear and succint a way. Whoever at Novell that wrote the report did an excellent job and that is a very significant amount of writing skill and serious thought to be putting into that kind of work.
This Slashdot discussion about literacy in coporate America furthers the point that time saved by sloppy writing is far outweighed by the how it wastes other peoples time.
Odds are I've made many grammar, spelling and punctuation errors in this message. That's Moens Law of Corrections for you.