Good analysis, but you missed pointing out the obvious correlation.
Why would MSFT care about seeding a hardware market?
To force people to upgrade to a newer version of the OS that supports that hardware.
I'm not sure I buy that argument for home networking, though. There was plenty of good hardware for it before MSFT entered. Hmm, at least for hardwired -- what you say may be true for wireless -- which is more demanding of OS and driver support anyway.
(And what bozo just moderated the parent "offtopic"? The topic is Microsoft and the hardware market, hello? I'd mod it +1 insightful.)
The same MS who jumped into the game console market with Sony and Nintendo? Who wrote Word and Excel, when the market already had Wordperfect and Lotus? Those guys? The ones who wrote Internet Explorer when Netscape was already on it's third release?
I'm not sure about Word, but MS bought Excel. As for IE, they bought (well, sorta) Spyglass which was based on the same Mosaic code that the Netscape authors wrote before they started Netscape.
(The "well, sorta" for Spyglass/IE is that the original deal was to pay a percentage of the selling price... which turned out to be $0.00. Spyglass ultimately sued and MSFT settled with a lump sum payment.)
You can say what you like about MS, but don't say competition scares them.
Competition terrifies them. They make enough on Windows and Office (80% margin) that they can throw money at all their other business lines (which are net losers) in the hopes that something eventually sticks, but the thought of real competition in their core market, that they can't buy their way out of, reduces them to panic. As witness some of the bizarre things they've been saying and doing over the last year or two.
That said, though, you raise interesting points and a valid question.
is it possible for a laser beam to get so hot that it causes the air inside of it to turn visibly vapourous?
Yes. I've seen pictures of the effect, possible from as early as the late 1960s. Turns the air in the beam into a plasma.
The problem is, that plasma is generally much less transparent to the laser than the air was (although that wasn't perfectly transparent or it wouldn't have absorbed any laser light), so the beam wastes its energy close to the laser emitter.
The goal with these things is to come up with laser frequencies at which the air is as near to invisible as possible, so that all the energy goes to the target (and you have less to worry about diffraction effects, etc.)
(One exception is if you want to ionize the air so that it will conduct an electric charge, to make something like an optical Taser. Phasers on stun, anyone?)
Ouch. Bad example. Bowling For Columbine is one of the worst pieces of propagandist crap to come out in a long time. A lot of it is pure bullshit, and skillful (if malicious) editing presents a lot of stuff taken out of context to mean something other than what was originally intended.
BTW, I live in the Columbine High School district -- it's a few blocks away -- so I have some firsthand knowledge of this.
Using Bowling for Columbine in a course about anything is equivalent to using Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will in a course on mid-20th Century European history -- okay if it's carefully put in the right context first.
The PPA website (linked in the original message) has a handy tab link to this guide to your elected reps -- drill down appropriately to get addresses, fax numbers, etc.
(Yeah, the info is available elsewhere and probably on.gov sites, but why not use up a little of PPAs bandwidth?)
Not only that, but Stargate SG1 was and is originally filmed in wide-screen, and transferred to DVD that way (16x9) so you get even more for your money.
In general I'm reluctant to spend more than about $10/disc for a TV series boxed set, and not much more than that for a movie series (eg James Bond can be had for about $13-$15/disc.)
all the voice talent recorded their lines separately to each other, in their own booths, and often not even at the same time. How an actor is supposed to build up any sense of timing or interrelation in a scenario like that I can't even begin to guess.
Almost all animation is done like that, which is a testament to the talents of the voice actors involved. One exception that comes to mind was "The Road to El Dorado", where the two lead actors (Kevin Kline and Keith Brannagh?) recorded at least some of their scenes together. But mostly it's done seperately, and before the animation is done (sometimes they'll videotape the actors for the animators to work off of, to get facial expressions etc.) Being a good voice actor -- or a good actor, period, -- is harder than it looks in the final product.
Of course, animation technology was a lot more primitive in those days, and when you're cranking out a weekly show you have different contstraints than a feature movie.
That's why they chose the letter "X". At the time Pournelle and others (including myself) had been pushing for the resumption of the X program which had pretty much petered out. We got DC-X, and then the X-series started to revive (although not quite in the same spirit as the original program.)
The prize program itself was very much modelled on named prizes like the Orteig Prize, and "X" worked out both for unknown and for the X Program. Both the named prize and X program memes were floating around in space activist circles (Space Frontier Foundation, the old L5 component of NSS, High Frontier, etc -- not the NSS and Planetary Society fanboys) in the late 80s/early 90s.
I think definition 1.1 is somewhat bogus. Most agnostics I know would be willing to believe in a God were He to offer proof of His existence (unarguable miracles, perhaps). In other words, they believe that it is possible to know whether there is a God if one indeed exists, it just hasn't been proved (to their satisfaction) yet. By the definition given they'd just shrug and say "that doesn't prove anything".
Most atheists (the evangelical ones, anyway;-) are not merely a-theist (non-theist), they're downright anti-theist.
As for "a believer is someone who has faith" -- true in a religious context, but how much faith does one have if one believes the sun will rise tomorrow, or that if you drop something (on Earth), it will fall down? I'm a believer in physics, is that faith?
Famous for nothing? Hardly -- the prize itself has been a big incentive to the various candidate groups, and the money has to come from somewhere.
That was the idea behind the prize in the first place, but no big donor stepped forward early -- hence the "X" prize because there was no name, yet, to attach to it. The intention was always to name it after whoever stepped up with the prize money.
Read your aviation (and other technology) history, you'll see lots of progress due to (named) prizes offered by folks with no skills but how to make (or inherit) money.
I just can't wait for the new Maxwell House Instant Shuttle from NASA.
Me neither, although preferably not from NASA. And I think FedEx or American Airlines might be more likely logos.
The web has taught people that buttons can look like just about any damn thing the designer pleases, and they'll happily point'n'click at anything that looks vaguely clickable. Different skins for media apps prove that.
I'm not arguing that it's efficient, mind, but anyone who is confused over different widget sets has other, worse problems.
Amen. A few known apps, a few known ports, and close off everything else.
I've got pretty much everything firewalled off here. The 'nix boxes don't really care that much, but it keeps the Windows boxes safer. I just looked at my firewall logs and it looks like sasser attacks were coming in every couple of minutes for a while, then dropped off for about a half-hour, then there was a brief flurry of one every six or seven seconds for the last couple of minutes.
I'm tempted to program it (the firewall box) to make a "SPLAT!" sound every time an offending packet hits the iris, er, is dropped.
Show me where the pilgrims were mentioned in the original post.
But you do admit that they fled England because of religious persecution. Where you are confused is in not realizing that, for them, Holland's atmosphere of religious freedom was also so contrary to their beliefs that they fled to the New World for religious reasons. For them, religous "freedom" was religious "intolerance". (Just as it is for today's islamofascists.) They didn't want religious freedom, they wanted their religion.
You provide an interesting -- and irrelevant -- expansion of that particular migration story (although not quite 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth'). I didn't attend US schools, so have a somewhat less US-centric view of the European settlement of the Americas. I agree that most American school texts paint a peculiarly distorted view -- as, for that matter, do the texts of other countries, from their particular viewpoint.
Crossing some portion of space does not require high tech, just some (big) aluminum cans, kerosene, and oxygen. (Hell, we got to the Moon with technology that is approaching 50 years old.)
Furthermore, Mars can NEVER be self-sustaining.
On what do you base that pontification? Heck, no doubt some of Europeans who saw some of the early New World colonies wiped out in the first winter thought the same thing. Never is a long time.
In your standard 42U cabinet, you're talking a half-U per server. Umm.. not happening.
One word: blades.
I'm not saying that's what Google uses (I have no idea), but that is how to cram servers in at less than 1U per server (eg 8 or more server blades in 4U of rack). There are also some 1U boxes that cram 2 servers in side by side.
So the people whom I will hesitate to call religious nuts who came to the "New World" wasn't to "offset population"?
No. Indeed, whether or not you hesitate to call them "religious nuts", for many of them their contemporaries had no such hesitation, and they came to escape religious persecution. Did you sleep through history class?
The history of peoples all over the world -- including the various tribes of Asian-Americans who got here before the Euro-Americans -- is one of "stealing the land" of others. If you don't think that those who were "already here" did it to each other long before Europeans (who were also doing it to each other) arrived, you need to study your history.
At least with the Moon and Mars we can be reasonably confident that there are no indigenes or autochthons to "steal" from.
First, nobody said anything about interstellar travel. Or did you think the Moon and Mars were stars?
Second, crossing the ocean with the technology of the 1500s was just as dangerous -- maybe moreso -- than crossing interplanetary space with current technology. Hell, in those days they had no idea where they were going or even where they were (no good way to measure longitude). They knew very little about using the sea to keep them alive, certainly not how to get fresh water from it, and the incidence of scurvey and other diseases of malnourishment was frightening.
There's a very valid psychological component to the "more room" argument.
Emigration from Europe to the "New World" was never enough to offset population growth either, but there was a psychological benefit for all, and it certainly gave the restless and discontented somewhere to go instead of stirring up trouble at home.
We could use that again, about now.
(For other benefits, see the chapter "Rocket to the Renaissance" in Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future.)
In my software engineering class, my teacher vehemently states that Requirements are the Enemy of Design.
Good grief. Has your teacher ever designed anything in his (or her) life? I guess it's true what they say about "those who can't do".
You need to have an idea of what you are doing for the project,
In other words, you need to have an idea of what is required.
you honestly cannot know how much space it will take, how fast it will be, etc.
Those aren't requirements (except, perhaps, for an embedded or real-time system), those are specifications. Requirements != specifications, although there may (depending on the app) be a requirement that it meet certain specifications.
Design is impossible without requirements. Oh, you might throw some code together (there's a great cartoon I've had for years, and have used in a few presentations, reviews, etc. Room full of programmers at their computers, one guy is leaving the room and turns back to say "You guys start coding, I'll go up and see what they need."), but in the absence of an idea of what the customer wants (ie, his requirement), you might as well just be writing yet another "Hello, world!" program. It'll be about as useful.
Now, some of the extreme/agile/this-week's-buzzword programming folks might like to think they're doing something different. The only difference between that and the older formal "waterfall" method is that instead of assembling the requirements -- stories -- into one document before design and coding starts, they do it incrementally: get a requirement, write some code, test it out; get another requirement, write or modify the code, test it out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, that latter method certainly has its advantages when "a customer may realize that they want it differently as the process is going along", because it does allow the design to be dynamic. But the design always tracks the customer's (possibly changing) requirements. (Or should, anyway.)
Sometimes, though, the customer knows what he wants and it isn't going to change -- a guidance program for a VroomStar I rocket is going to have well nailed-down requirements, and specifications, since the guidance computer, power available, characteristics of the rocket, etc, are going to be well established ahead of time (with long lead times) and very difficult to change. Sure, change will still happen, but it's not like the customer is going to launch a few VroomStars with a half-complete version of the guidance package and then write up the next stories for the development team.
So, 10 years ago Kerry was the most liberal member of the senate. That's quite a distinction for a person that some would have us believe is merely "Bush Lite".
Of course, the original post didn't claim that Kerry was the "most liberal", merely that his voting record was to the left of Ted Kennedy's. Kennedy isn't the second most liberal, but he does rank fairly high up there.
You're probably just trolling, but in the event you really are that ignorant and were asleep through November and December of 2000, let me refresh your memory:
The Supreme Court ruled that it would be a violation of the Equal Protection clause to let Florida do recounts in only some, instead of all, precincts. The Gore campaign wanted only selective recounts, amazingly enough only in Democrat-friendly areas. The Bush campaign was willing to go along with recounts in all districts, but not solely Democrat cherry-picked ones.
The Supreme Court did not determine the winner of the Florida electoral votes. Those votes were cast, and counted, (and recounted) under the Federal and Florida state election laws. The attempt by the (mostly Democrat) Florida Supreme Court to select Gore by allowing selective recounts was correctly thrown out as unconstitutional.
The Florida delegates to the Electoral College being duly elected, Bush was elected to the Presidency by a majority vote of that College. Note that if Gore had won his home state of Tennessee, he would have had sufficient electoral votes to win the Presidency without Florida. He didn't, and he didn't.
(Interestingly enough, independant recounts by various news agencies and other parties after the election seem to indicate that Bush would have won even if the Gore selective-recount had proceeded. For the most part the news media quietly buried that story.)
Bush Jr.[sic] became president with less than half the vote.
Half the counted vote, perhaps. Many absentee and overseas military ballots were never counted, in districts where they wouldn't have affected the election in that district. We'll never know the percentage of actual votes cast.
But so what? So was Clinton. By a considerably smaller percentage than G.W. Bush; Clinton got 43% of the popular vote in 1992, and only in his home state (Arkansas) did he get more than 50% (not that the elder Bush did well either, with Perot soaking up nearly 19% of the popular vote).
Matter of fact, he was selected with less than the majority of the votes.
Well, duh, that's what less than half means. And you misspelled "elected".
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You've brought back many a memory of model rocketry. Bless the memory of Vern Estes.
And G. Harry Stine.
Are you sure you're not just infested with a Goa'uld?
Good analysis, but you missed pointing out the obvious correlation.
Why would MSFT care about seeding a hardware market?
To force people to upgrade to a newer version of the OS that supports that hardware.
I'm not sure I buy that argument for home networking, though. There was plenty of good hardware for it before MSFT entered. Hmm, at least for hardwired -- what you say may be true for wireless -- which is more demanding of OS and driver support anyway.
(And what bozo just moderated the parent "offtopic"? The topic is Microsoft and the hardware market, hello? I'd mod it +1 insightful.)
We are talking about the same MS, right?
... which turned out to be $0.00. Spyglass ultimately sued and MSFT settled with a lump sum payment.)
The same MS who jumped into the game console market with Sony and Nintendo? Who wrote Word and Excel, when the market already had Wordperfect and Lotus? Those guys? The ones who wrote Internet Explorer when Netscape was already on it's third release?
I'm not sure about Word, but MS bought Excel. As for IE, they bought (well, sorta) Spyglass which was based on the same Mosaic code that the Netscape authors wrote before they started Netscape.
(The "well, sorta" for Spyglass/IE is that the original deal was to pay a percentage of the selling price
You can say what you like about MS, but don't say competition scares them.
Competition terrifies them. They make enough on Windows and Office (80% margin) that they can throw money at all their other business lines (which are net losers) in the hopes that something eventually sticks, but the thought of real competition in their core market, that they can't buy their way out of, reduces them to panic. As witness some of the bizarre things they've been saying and doing over the last year or two.
That said, though, you raise interesting points and a valid question.
is it possible for a laser beam to get so hot that it causes the air inside of it to turn visibly vapourous?
Yes. I've seen pictures of the effect, possible from as early as the late 1960s. Turns the air in the beam into a plasma.
The problem is, that plasma is generally much less transparent to the laser than the air was (although that wasn't perfectly transparent or it wouldn't have absorbed any laser light), so the beam wastes its energy close to the laser emitter.
The goal with these things is to come up with laser frequencies at which the air is as near to invisible as possible, so that all the energy goes to the target (and you have less to worry about diffraction effects, etc.)
(One exception is if you want to ionize the air so that it will conduct an electric charge, to make something like an optical Taser. Phasers on stun, anyone?)
Ouch. Bad example. Bowling For Columbine is one of the worst pieces of propagandist crap to come out in a long time. A lot of it is pure bullshit, and skillful (if malicious) editing presents a lot of stuff taken out of context to mean something other than what was originally intended.
BTW, I live in the Columbine High School district -- it's a few blocks away -- so I have some firsthand knowledge of this.
Using Bowling for Columbine in a course about anything is equivalent to using Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will in a course on mid-20th Century European history -- okay if it's carefully put in the right context first.
The PPA website (linked in the original message) has a handy tab link to this guide to your elected reps -- drill down appropriately to get addresses, fax numbers, etc.
.gov sites, but why not use up a little of PPAs bandwidth?)
(Yeah, the info is available elsewhere and probably on
Not only that, but Stargate SG1 was and is originally filmed in wide-screen, and transferred to DVD that way (16x9) so you get even more for your money.
In general I'm reluctant to spend more than about $10/disc for a TV series boxed set, and not much more than that for a movie series (eg James Bond can be had for about $13-$15/disc.)
all the voice talent recorded their lines separately to each other, in their own booths, and often not even at the same time. How an actor is supposed to build up any sense of timing or interrelation in a scenario like that I can't even begin to guess.
Almost all animation is done like that, which is a testament to the talents of the voice actors involved. One exception that comes to mind was "The Road to El Dorado", where the two lead actors (Kevin Kline and Keith Brannagh?) recorded at least some of their scenes together. But mostly it's done seperately, and before the animation is done (sometimes they'll videotape the actors for the animators to work off of, to get facial expressions etc.) Being a good voice actor -- or a good actor, period, -- is harder than it looks in the final product.
Of course, animation technology was a lot more primitive in those days, and when you're cranking out a weekly show you have different contstraints than a feature movie.
That's why they chose the letter "X". At the time Pournelle and others (including myself) had been pushing for the resumption of the X program which had pretty much petered out. We got DC-X, and then the X-series started to revive (although not quite in the same spirit as the original program.)
The prize program itself was very much modelled on named prizes like the Orteig Prize, and "X" worked out both for unknown and for the X Program. Both the named prize and X program memes were floating around in space activist circles (Space Frontier Foundation, the old L5 component of NSS, High Frontier, etc -- not the NSS and Planetary Society fanboys) in the late 80s/early 90s.
I think definition 1.1 is somewhat bogus. Most agnostics I know would be willing to believe in a God were He to offer proof of His existence (unarguable miracles, perhaps). In other words, they believe that it is possible to know whether there is a God if one indeed exists, it just hasn't been proved (to their satisfaction) yet. By the definition given they'd just shrug and say "that doesn't prove anything".
;-) are not merely a-theist (non-theist), they're downright anti-theist.
Most atheists (the evangelical ones, anyway
As for "a believer is someone who has faith" -- true in a religious context, but how much faith does one have if one believes the sun will rise tomorrow, or that if you drop something (on Earth), it will fall down? I'm a believer in physics, is that faith?
Famous for nothing? Hardly -- the prize itself has been a big incentive to the various candidate groups, and the money has to come from somewhere.
That was the idea behind the prize in the first place, but no big donor stepped forward early -- hence the "X" prize because there was no name, yet, to attach to it. The intention was always to name it after whoever stepped up with the prize money.
Read your aviation (and other technology) history, you'll see lots of progress due to (named) prizes offered by folks with no skills but how to make (or inherit) money.
I just can't wait for the new Maxwell House Instant Shuttle from NASA.
Me neither, although preferably not from NASA. And I think FedEx or American Airlines might be more likely logos.
Widgets, schmidgets.
The web has taught people that buttons can look like just about any damn thing the designer pleases, and they'll happily point'n'click at anything that looks vaguely clickable. Different skins for media apps prove that.
I'm not arguing that it's efficient, mind, but anyone who is confused over different widget sets has other, worse problems.
Amen. A few known apps, a few known ports, and close off everything else.
I've got pretty much everything firewalled off here. The 'nix boxes don't really care that much, but it keeps the Windows boxes safer. I just looked at my firewall logs and it looks like sasser attacks were coming in every couple of minutes for a while, then dropped off for about a half-hour, then there was a brief flurry of one every six or seven seconds for the last couple of minutes.
I'm tempted to program it (the firewall box) to make a "SPLAT!" sound every time an offending packet hits the iris, er, is dropped.
Show me where the pilgrims were mentioned in the original post.
But you do admit that they fled England because of religious persecution. Where you are confused is in not realizing that, for them, Holland's atmosphere of religious freedom was also so contrary to their beliefs that they fled to the New World for religious reasons. For them, religous "freedom" was religious "intolerance". (Just as it is for today's islamofascists.) They didn't want religious freedom, they wanted their religion.
You provide an interesting -- and irrelevant -- expansion of that particular migration story (although not quite 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth'). I didn't attend US schools, so have a somewhat less US-centric view of the European settlement of the Americas. I agree that most American school texts paint a peculiarly distorted view -- as, for that matter, do the texts of other countries, from their particular viewpoint.
Crossing some portion of space does not require high tech, just some (big) aluminum cans, kerosene, and oxygen. (Hell, we got to the Moon with technology that is approaching 50 years old.)
Furthermore, Mars can NEVER be self-sustaining.
On what do you base that pontification? Heck, no doubt some of Europeans who saw some of the early New World colonies wiped out in the first winter thought the same thing. Never is a long time.
In your standard 42U cabinet, you're talking a half-U per server. Umm.. not happening.
One word: blades.
I'm not saying that's what Google uses (I have no idea), but that is how to cram servers in at less than 1U per server (eg 8 or more server blades in 4U of rack). There are also some 1U boxes that cram 2 servers in side by side.
So the people whom I will hesitate to call religious nuts who came to the "New World" wasn't to "offset population"?
No. Indeed, whether or not you hesitate to call them "religious nuts", for many of them their contemporaries had no such hesitation, and they came to escape religious persecution. Did you sleep through history class?
The history of peoples all over the world -- including the various tribes of Asian-Americans who got here before the Euro-Americans -- is one of "stealing the land" of others. If you don't think that those who were "already here" did it to each other long before Europeans (who were also doing it to each other) arrived, you need to study your history.
At least with the Moon and Mars we can be reasonably confident that there are no indigenes or autochthons to "steal" from.
First, nobody said anything about interstellar travel. Or did you think the Moon and Mars were stars?
Second, crossing the ocean with the technology of the 1500s was just as dangerous -- maybe moreso -- than crossing interplanetary space with current technology. Hell, in those days they had no idea where they were going or even where they were (no good way to measure longitude). They knew very little about using the sea to keep them alive, certainly not how to get fresh water from it, and the incidence of scurvey and other diseases of malnourishment was frightening.
There's a very valid psychological component to the "more room" argument.
Emigration from Europe to the "New World" was never enough to offset population growth either, but there was a psychological benefit for all, and it certainly gave the restless and discontented somewhere to go instead of stirring up trouble at home.
We could use that again, about now.
(For other benefits, see the chapter "Rocket to the Renaissance" in Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future.)
In my software engineering class, my teacher vehemently states that Requirements are the Enemy of Design.
Good grief. Has your teacher ever designed anything in his (or her) life? I guess it's true what they say about "those who can't do".
You need to have an idea of what you are doing for the project,
In other words, you need to have an idea of what is required.
you honestly cannot know how much space it will take, how fast it will be, etc.
Those aren't requirements (except, perhaps, for an embedded or real-time system), those are specifications. Requirements != specifications, although there may (depending on the app) be a requirement that it meet certain specifications.
Design is impossible without requirements. Oh, you might throw some code together (there's a great cartoon I've had for years, and have used in a few presentations, reviews, etc. Room full of programmers at their computers, one guy is leaving the room and turns back to say "You guys start coding, I'll go up and see what they need."), but in the absence of an idea of what the customer wants (ie, his requirement), you might as well just be writing yet another "Hello, world!" program. It'll be about as useful.
Now, some of the extreme/agile/this-week's-buzzword programming folks might like to think they're doing something different. The only difference between that and the older formal "waterfall" method is that instead of assembling the requirements -- stories -- into one document before design and coding starts, they do it incrementally: get a requirement, write some code, test it out; get another requirement, write or modify the code, test it out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Now, that latter method certainly has its advantages when "a customer may realize that they want it differently as the process is going along", because it does allow the design to be dynamic. But the design always tracks the customer's (possibly changing) requirements. (Or should, anyway.)
Sometimes, though, the customer knows what he wants and it isn't going to change -- a guidance program for a VroomStar I rocket is going to have well nailed-down requirements, and specifications, since the guidance computer, power available, characteristics of the rocket, etc, are going to be well established ahead of time (with long lead times) and very difficult to change. Sure, change will still happen, but it's not like the customer is going to launch a few VroomStars with a half-complete version of the guidance package and then write up the next stories for the development team.
So, 10 years ago Kerry was the most liberal member of the senate. That's quite a distinction for a person that some would have us believe is merely "Bush Lite".
Of course, the original post didn't claim that Kerry was the "most liberal", merely that his voting record was to the left of Ted Kennedy's. Kennedy isn't the second most liberal, but he does rank fairly high up there.
You're probably just trolling, but in the event you really are that ignorant and were asleep through November and December of 2000, let me refresh your memory:
The Supreme Court ruled that it would be a violation of the Equal Protection clause to let Florida do recounts in only some, instead of all, precincts. The Gore campaign wanted only selective recounts, amazingly enough only in Democrat-friendly areas. The Bush campaign was willing to go along with recounts in all districts, but not solely Democrat cherry-picked ones.
The Supreme Court did not determine the winner of the Florida electoral votes. Those votes were cast, and counted, (and recounted) under the Federal and Florida state election laws. The attempt by the (mostly Democrat) Florida Supreme Court to select Gore by allowing selective recounts was correctly thrown out as unconstitutional.
The Florida delegates to the Electoral College being duly elected, Bush was elected to the Presidency by a majority vote of that College. Note that if Gore had won his home state of Tennessee, he would have had sufficient electoral votes to win the Presidency without Florida. He didn't, and he didn't.
(Interestingly enough, independant recounts by various news agencies and other parties after the election seem to indicate that Bush would have won even if the Gore selective-recount had proceeded. For the most part the news media quietly buried that story.)
Bush Jr.[sic] became president with less than half the vote.
Half the counted vote, perhaps. Many absentee and overseas military ballots were never counted, in districts where they wouldn't have affected the election in that district. We'll never know the percentage of actual votes cast.
But so what? So was Clinton. By a considerably smaller percentage than G.W. Bush; Clinton got 43% of the popular vote in 1992, and only in his home state (Arkansas) did he get more than 50% (not that the elder Bush did well either, with Perot soaking up nearly 19% of the popular vote).
Matter of fact, he was selected with less than the majority of the votes.
Well, duh, that's what less than half means. And you misspelled "elected".
So what's your point?
What's yours? (Not that I really care.)