I think you may have been measuring wrong.
If you took each box side to side at 10" wide (not end to end) you would get approx. 6,336 boxes to the mile. Divide 48,000 by 6,336 gives you over 7.5 miles of boxes side by side.
There is probably no more than 1,000 pages per box which would give us a total of 48,000,000 pages.
If you had 50 people translating 24/7 with a typed translation taking 30 minutes per page it would take 1,000,000 days or 2740 years to translate all of the material.
This could be one reason that this is to be released on the internet.
This reminds me of the old philosophical question:
"If you had a million congressmen at a million typewriters, each one churning out a page of law per minute, how long would it be before you found a page that made sense?"
He needs to have all the documents scanned, posted on the web, searchable, and have it so Arabic speakers can post their translations and others can comment. Hey, sounds like Free Republic!
"I think you may have been measuring wrong."
to paraphrase..(grin).."don't use your rode to measure this crap....It's too small and I can't count that high."
...sorry..just had to say it..best line hollywood(Jarhead) came out with this year...lol. Not sure what to make of this 'release' of info on the matter. To me..it looks like weakness..i suspect it looks like weakness to our enemies as well at this point. But..u (we)..asked for it and now we have it. Are we happy yet? Enough to bump up Bush's poll numbers..or are we a bunch of fair weather friends making assumptions on info that we think we think can do a better job of interpretation of the arabic language than the professionals?
I am not so sure of this 'strategery' anymore....it looks lame now that the Whitehouse has tossed it out here. It makes them look incapable of dealing with it and the dems will play it to their advantage. But..it seems a few of us have a 'suicide' mission: "Let's destroy the party....maybe Ross Perot will come and lead us again.." (rolling eyes)....
Hell..maybe we can make milk toast Frist our nominee..YIPPEE!!! Better yet..let's go with a real 'bomber'....McLame!!! Yea..that's the ticket!!
(rolling eyes)