bt’s Weblog

Reporters trying to tell readers what president Shrub said are challenged to present mumbled ramblings as meaningful text. To illustrate, here’s an article from the New York Times, July 8, 2006.

“Justices Tacitly Backed Use of Guantánamo, Bush Says”
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

In his most detailed comments to date on the Supreme Court’s rejection of his decision to put detainees on trial before military commissions, President Bush said Friday that the court had tacitly approved his use of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

This is what he actually said:

It didn’t say we couldn’t have done - couldn’t have made that decision, see?” Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. “They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo - whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made.”

How’s that for “his most detailed comments to date.” Sounds like a seventh grader to me. No offense is intended to the majority of seventh graders who probably know what the words “tacitly approved” actually mean.

But wait, the use of Guantánamo Bay wasn’t even an issue in the case…

The court, ruled broadly last week in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military commissions were unauthorized by statute and violated international law. The question of whether Mr. Bush had properly used Guantánamo Bay to house detainees was not at issue in the case.”

Then there’s the double speak

I am willing to abide by the ruling of the Supreme Court,” the president said.

Mr. Bush has said since the ruling that he will work with Congress to figure out how to use military commissions to try detainees, a promise he repeated on Friday in Chicago.”

In other words, “I am not really willing to abide by the Supreme Court ruling. Even now advisers (who have some intelligence) are trying to figure out how to get around it. Karl Rove said I should say I agree which is the line the stupid GOP clones will hear. Meanwhile, like always, I’m gonna do what the hell I want.”

This year the 4th is on Tuesday, at the end of a four day weekend. I’m rather relaxed and have no plans except to walk a hundred yards or so and sit on “our” hill along with lots of neighbors and watch the fireworks a few miles away in New Haven harbor. Perhaps half the crowd will be speaking Spanish but that’s the way it should be. We are a nation of immigrants aren’t we?

I think back to some July 4ths and come up with a few that are memorable.

In the early 70’s I ‘did’ the fireworks on the Mall in D.C. Those were a real celebration of America as 250,000 or so folks of all shapes, sizes and colors sat on the lawns and had a picnic. We all oooed and aahhed at the fireworks and gave a big cheer at the end. I was back in the early 80’s when it was decided to have Wayne Newton replace the Beachboys as the lead act before the fireworks. It rained and the concert was called off because of the threat of lightning. But the real show went on and we were on the windward side of the fireworks so along with the rain drops we were sprinkled with ash and other debris from the explosions. Still, it was a reunion with two former students who had just returned from an Outward Bound experience and a student or two from the school I was teaching at. We had a great time.

The American Embassy in Dacca, Bangladesh had plans for a picnic and fireworks for the Bicentennial and I was eager to attend this special 4th celebration. Unfortunately, that is the monsoon season so we managed to have hot dogs and hamburgers in the drizzle but the fireworks were postponed and then cancelled. Guess it made the 200th Anniversary of Independence even more memorable.

In 1980 I was with good friends in Mountain, WI enjoying some summer boating, fishing and fun. We gathered at a small field in that very small town and watched the fireworks as we drank beer and celebrated our friendship along with our country’s birthday. A couple of years later I was in Wilkes-Barre, PA and again with friends we listened to the NE PA Symphony Orchestra play the 1812 Overture and the fireworks began as the last part was played. Somehow a Russian overture celebrating the defeat of the French in 1812 has become part of the American Independence Day experience. Must be the cannons.

Staten Island, NY in the early 90’s was a real bang up affair because loads of people shoot off monster fireworks from the street. I mean these are the chrysanthemums that “blossom” a thousand feet in the air only sometimes they didn’t make it more than a couple of hundred. A cloud of smoke drifted over the island and the smell of gunpowder was in the air. The next day the streets were littered with mortars and burnt out launchers. In a city where firecrackers are illegal this was an in-your-face show of independence that stirred my soul.

The common thread in my memories of great 4th of July celebrations is being with friends among a crowd of revelers as the colorful displays burst overhead. I’ve always loved the physical feel of the percussion as the big ones explode and cheered with everyone else as if we were all seeing fireworks for the first time. For those minutes we are again children of the American Revolution, the great experiment whose effects have carried us onward for these 230 years.

I have 3.83 GB of data in jpeg and zip formats on a DVD disc. I want to transfer the data to my hard drive. How long will it take?

If you answered “over 4 hours” you are correct.

But how can this be? I can watch a 4 GB DVD movie in two hours and burn that amount of data in 45 minutes. It takes 4.5 minutes to copy that much data from one part of a hard disk to another and only 3.25 minutes to copy it between two hard disks. My Sony DRU-800 drive says it can read DVD data at 16X (~21.6MB/sec) but 3.83 GB in 4 hours is only 0.328 MB/sec or about 65 times slower!

If you have an answer I’d like to hear it. My hunch is that there is something very inefficient about Windows XP’s Windows Explorer algorithms for handling files stored on optical media.

Something is very wrong with a file system that operates in such an inconsistent manner. Four hours to read 4 GB is ridiculous. My ISP (AT&T) claims it can deliver 3MBits/sec on the DSL line (I’ve never seen more than half that). But the 3MBit rate is equal to what XP did with my DVD data.

Now WTF is going on in this alleged “powerful state-of-the-art operating system” that reduces an ATA-100 bus driven by a 1.6GB processor to a merely fast DSL connection? Something is rotten in Redmond or perhaps the whole industry is a sham. We throw gigaeverythings at data and get shit results.

A couple of days ago as I was burning a DVD data disc I realized that my machine could not do anything much besides that. Well, it played mp3 files (Winamp) and I could play solitaire (Freecell) but sometimes the music skipped a beat and the cards didn’t move right away because the burner needed the processor. I sure as hell could not edit video files at the same time. It seems to me that a fast computer (faster than mine) should be able to digitize a video, burn a DVD and edit another video file all at the same time (while playing music, of course).

Somehow having a processor that is 3,000 times faster and has the same factor increase in memory and hard disk storage hasn’t produced a system that can do 3,000 times what the IBM AT did twenty-five years ago. Did I miss something or do others see the disconnect between computer resources and performance? At this rate not even a teraflop supercomputer will be able to take my verbal directions as I capture, edit and burn video data and take time out to say “hello” to friends who happen by for a live video chat session.