IO threats come in many different forms. Maybe it’s a server-clogging 12 megabyte PowerPoint slide with an embedded photo of a tropical sunset inviting you to a retirement luncheon for someone you’ve never met.
Perhaps it’s the 8th volley of a “reply to all” e-mail chain recounting a discussion that’s irrelevant to you and 47 of the other 50 CC’d addressees. Or it could be the important deadline you overlooked because the task and due date were buried somewhere in the middle of a rambling narrative, the subject line of which failed to differentiate it in any way from the inescapable rising tide of inconsequential flotsam already choking your inbox.

There was a half-joking idea years ago about air dropping PowerPoint software on adversary nations and watching their productivity grind to a halt.

the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, as the room erupted in laughter.

as edward tufte says, powerpoint kills

The hit list nomination process is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

Dan Hon noticed that Star Trek’s meetings and conferences always involve military officers, usually occur with ample time for preparation, yet invariably has them just talking to one another. If there are any graphics involved, they are simple, concise and expressive. This is of course nothing whatsoever like any military on earth or off it. So Hon decided to photoshop what such meetings would actually entail: PowerPoint, and lots of it.

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