Funny, though, with 486.429 BILLION, ExxonMobile apparently has only managed to funnel 6.5 million of that to defenders of science?
All that says is that it costs a lot more to research what is happening in the world than it does to come up with short sound bites to rubbish science, especially when you consider that those sound bites don't have to be accurate.
You wait for Zynga to win and set precedent.
Then you sue using their own precedent against them.
That assumes that any lawsuit would actually get won. The majority of the time a company will settle the case if it looks like they are going to lose (or they deem it cheaper to settle than pay for a lengthy trial).
If the point of the game is to slug thru levels just so you can advance the plot, you are just putting yourself under stress just to watch the next chapter, you are not enjoying the game, you are using the stress of the game so you can enjoy the next cut scene.
Who are you to say that someone isn't enjoying a game because they like watching cut scenes, or at least like to know why they are killing a bunch of people in the game? Perhaps it is you who is missing out on the full enjoyment of gaming because without the storyline you are effectively just replaying Doom all the time, but with different maps (and the ability to look up).
Perhaps the next time you rent a movie you setup a timer for every 15 minutes. Watch 15 minutes of the movie when the timer goes off. Walk a mile on a treadmill then go back and watch an other 15 minutes, you will get the same effect.
Here's an even better idea: next time you watch a good action movie, pay attention to how they structure the story so that the action scenes are split up by slower, dialog driven scenes. It is like they have a built-in cut scenes! There are some films that do not do this, but they tend to be at best B-grade films and at worst Z-grade. With cookie-cutter Hollywood films you can probably set your timer and find a very obvious pattern to the scene changes. You will probably find they coincide with where TV stations would insert their ad breaks.
Finally, I don't understand the hate stirred up by cut scenes. All good games should have the ability to skip them (and then display a summary of your new goals when returning to the gameplay). Obviously those games that require dialog decisions from the player can't be skippable, but then those scenes are just another form of gameplay.
Why MS devs need a style guide: they thought the ribbon was a good idea.
Quite frankly, it was. I did have some problems, like the icon that turned out to be a menu (how many people had problems with that?) and Microsoft's refusal to repeat any function on two different tabs (so if something is on the home tab then it cannot appear elsewhere even if it should logically be on that other tab). However, if you watch ordinary people using Office 2003 (or below) then you will notice that they tend to hunt around the toolbars for functions rather than use the menus where you don't need to hover the mouse to read what a button does. The ribbon is perfect for those people. It is also good for tablet users.
The biggest problem people had with the ribbon was that it changed an existing user interface that had not changed substantially since the Windows 3.1 days. All of a sudden, they had to re-learn the package again. That is a pain in the proverbials. However, new users to Office 2007 and 2010 must surely be scratching their heads and wondering what all the fuss was about.
I am sure that Windows 3.x had them too. For all the faults of Microsoft, you can't say that they don't like publishing books on how to program their operating systems.
Fast forward to the XAML/WPF/C# era and all that went out the window in favour of "rich" UIs where you have a stupid coloured orb that everyone thinks is decoration until you realise it's the main system menu, and every application has a different set of awful skins.
I agree with you on rise of flashy, non-standard user interfaces, but if you want to adhere to an official style guide now you can still use the ones written for each Windows platform (see my first link).
There is also a demo version of JAWS that works fine for testing purposes. It is what I used to test my sites. It is limited to working for 40 minutes before you have to reboot, which is a slight pain but is better than paying a lot of money for the product.
The fact that aDesigner requires "Internet Explorer 6.0 or above", thereby making the tool itself inaccessible to a significant portion of the web development community, is almost too much to bear.
That would be the significant portion that doesn't bother to test their sites with the very quirky browser used by an even more significant portion of their users. Something tells me that if they can't be bothered testing for a large segment of their market, then they would not bother to test for the much smaller segment of visually impaired users.
Yes, how dare GPL developers want to get paid for their software? (Payment is in code instead of money)
Oh look, another childish response. When did I say that GPL developers should not expect people to abide by the terms of their license?
People like you just leave me confused, you effectively claim that releasing software with restricted usage is wrong and short-sighted but then immediately go on to claim that software with restricted usage AND a monetary demand are good and wholesome.
Once again, I did not claim that anything was either wrong nor short-sighted, apart from claiming that someone who writes a non-GPL product will do this so that they can abuse other GPL software. I have made no judgement on any software license. Who could possibly complain when competitive packages exist to fulfill different markets?
Forgive me if I can't think of any word other than "scum" at the moment.
Or it could be about companies trying to avoid violating GPL. It is pretty harsh to call a group of people scum just it is possible that they could do something wrong. Shouldn't you at least wait to see what they do with this new software before calling them names?
According to TFA's comments, the Busybox replacement under discussion is Toybox, written by a former maintainer of Busybox. It cannot be clean room, whether or not that matters.
If the SFC wants to go through the source code line-by-line to look for any similarities so they can claim ownership of the code, then they are quite welcome to do so.
It is a strategy that worked well for SCO, and made them the darling of the software world that you see today!
They'll use the Linux kernel because the Linux kernel community doesn't bother with GPL enforcement.
The big difference is that their custom code that they would want to keep private would most likely be linked into Busybox and not the Linux kernel. This means that they might be quite happy to give out the source code to a mostly unmodified Linux (thus complying with GPL) while still keeping all their secrets by not having to disclose their modifications to busybox.
Making claims that writing their own replacement for busybox means that they will violate the GPL in other ways is the same kind of FUD as when Sony says that jailbreaking a device means you are a pirate, or when Microsoft says that GPL is a cancer. It would be the same as if Microsoft tried to claim that people using Wine did so to pirate Windows software.
The more childish response to anybody complaining about using GPL software in a commercial environment is "if you don't like it, write your own software". Well, that is exactly what Sony want to do. What amazes me is how long it took for anyone to do this. By making a non-GPL version, companies have a choice when creating new products. Now all they need is for someone to develop an alternative to Linux and release it under the BSD license. Now if only we could think of a name for such a project...
The people chosen to be surveyed have been picked from a pool from an online survey company.
It is true that they conduct the survey online, and like all surveys you should be wary of the results (especially when they are conducted for an organisation with an angle). But in this case it is run by a large, established market research company. This is not just a backyard operator extrapolating results from just 50 respondents. The participants come from the same pool of people who take part in their offline market research.
A 8 year increase in the average age of a gamer in 6 years?
Given the huge explosion of gaming capable being owned by traditionally non-gaming people (eg. smartphones, tablets), I don't think that it is too unusual that we should see the average age increase. The report showed the proportion of households with gaming devices increased dramatically over the 6 year period. Consider that back in 2005, most people with children would have already had some gaming device, so the bulk of the increase of households must have come from the older generation. Hence, the average age goes up.
Likely a lot of 18+ games will simply never hit the shelves in the original format, as parents will notice they are unsuitable for minors, rather than wallowing ignorance and buying unsuitable games for their children.
I don't think that parents will stop the 18+ games from being stocked. Most of the people I see in the computer game stores are adults. In Australia, the average age of a gamer is 32 years old. 75% of gamers are aged 18 or more. Source: Australian gamers getting older and wiser, Oct 2011, or download the full report.
As an aside, here is a suprising finding from the article:
63 per cent of gaming households play on a dedicated gaming console, 62 per cent play on PC, 43 per cent play on a mobile phone, 13 per cent on a gaming handheld and 13 per cent play games on a tablet computer.
I hope that if I get accused of any crimes that Microsoft absolves me.
As in this case, they will only absolve you of crimes of which they themselves have accused you. This accusation never had any legal backing other than the lawsuit brought about by Microsoft, so it is not as if the company was preempting an official investigation.
So don't go breaking in to your neighbor's house and hope that Microsoft will absolve you of your crime. You will need to become a priest if you are looking for an organisation to shield you from the legal system.
If my job depended on me getting grants to study global warming, then there is going to be a big need to study global warming.
That is some nice circular logic there. The problem is that scientists studying in many different (and not just "global warming") have found evidence to support the theory because it has such widespread effects on the planet.
Also, think of the times where the science has been shown to be wrong. The IPCC repots have had a few mistakes in them, and every single time the mistakes were discovered and published by other scientists. They did this without losing their jobs.
Finally, if science really worked the way that you described, then virtually all science would be bogus. It would not just affect the climate science. But there is absolutely no evidence to support it.
As for your links, the/. post claimed "Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady)." Talk about comparing apple to oranges. 1998 was hotter than any year immediately before or after it. It was not hot due to global warming, but as rgbatduke admits, was due to El Nino. So why use it as a benchmark year? It was an anomaly that should be discounted because of the other forces involved. And as soon as you discount that year, the temperature graph shows that it is still getting hotter. Even without discounting that year, the fact that the recent La Nina year was about the same temperature when that phenomenon should have made it cooler shows that the warming is still occurring.
I looked at the first case study of the second link and found that once the journalists talked to other scientists Aidan Dwyer's so-called breakthrough was debunked a week after the original story broke. I didn't bother reading further when the first point was so easily proven wrong, especially just to respond to an Anonymous Coward in an aging/. story.
Because years ago scientists used to think the earth was the center of our solar system.
This is not an example of scientists being wrong when the average person got it right. Neither is it an example of scientists studying something and coming up with a conclusion. They simply assumed that the Earth was the centre of everything because that was what everyone believed. The problem was that what they observed about the heavens did not match that belief, and a lot of fruitless work went into explaining discrepancy before they threw out those pre-conceived ideas of the universe. At that point, the scientific view diverged from the general public's view in a similar controversial, hotly debated manner as the climate change is today. And look who turned out to be correct then.
In the case of climate change, the observations do match the theory. There is no discrepancy to show any indication that the theory is wrong.
As for the advice on how to put a baby to bed, scientists will publicly admit that they do not have all the answers there. They have never said that it was a fact that you should have your baby in a particular orientation. They will give advice based on surveys and discussion with the parents of babies who died from SIDS. But their knowledge is limited by those damn ethics boards not allowing them to carry out experiments on children!
But once again this is not an example of science knowing less than lay people.
Because the scientists keep forging data to get more funding for their studies, and then poorly concealing their conspiratorial emails about said forging.
This is a claim that has absolutely no evidence to support it. It is an example of the sceptics being less than sceptical when it comes to their own claims.
To be fair: environmental alarmists have batting zero since forever.
I would not call that fair. This entire debate started when someone speculated about the possible impact of our increased CO2 emissions. It was speculated that if this increased the CO2 levels in the atmosphere that there could be a warming effect. It turned out that there was an increased level of CO2 and it was getting warming. That is a win right from the start.
I'm 52 years old, since I was a kid I've been hearing predictions of the earth's oil running out...
Guess what? Oil is running out as predicted. Estimates say that demand will exceed supply by 2020. Most of the estimates had it happening at some time in this decade, but the GFC actually helped here.
...massive widespread starvation due to over population...
According to the World Health Organization, hunger is the biggest threat to public health, and that 6 million children die of hunger every year
...unbreathabe air due to pollution...
There has been lots of work done to fix this, with new laws to reduce emissions by industry and cars. For example, the Great Smog of London in 1952 killed 12,000 people over four days. It directly led to the Clean Air Act of 1956.
...predication of the earth getting much colder...
Global cooling never had much support in the scientific community. These days, the idea of global cooling has been championed by the denialists as a benefit of global warming (to prevents an ice age)
...and much more. None of it has happened. At least not anywhere near the scale it was predicted to happen.
Does "and much more" include the hole in the ozone layer being caused by CFCs being pumped into the atmosphere? Because we used legislation to force industry to find alternatives to CFCs and the ozone layer is now getting smaller. Certainly doesn't sound like they are "batting zero".
I hope that you were just giving an example of what I was talking about earlier. Does anyone really think that scientists had not considered the question of the link between CO2 and global warming, and haven't spent a hundred years studying that exact thing?
And is the fact that Erik the Red gave Greenland an attractive name to convince people to settle there enough "proof" to invalidate the current theories? How did you know that the climate had changed in the past if it were not for the work of climate scientists?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, though, with 486.429 BILLION, ExxonMobile apparently has only managed to funnel 6.5 million of that to defenders of science?
All that says is that it costs a lot more to research what is happening in the world than it does to come up with short sound bites to rubbish science, especially when you consider that those sound bites don't have to be accurate.
You wait for Zynga to win and set precedent. Then you sue using their own precedent against them.
That assumes that any lawsuit would actually get won. The majority of the time a company will settle the case if it looks like they are going to lose (or they deem it cheaper to settle than pay for a lengthy trial).
Con-Air is not a case study any more than the movie "Terminator" should convince you to destroy your computer.
Judging by the number of people who haven't replied to you so far, I think that your advice came too late.
If the point of the game is to slug thru levels just so you can advance the plot, you are just putting yourself under stress just to watch the next chapter, you are not enjoying the game, you are using the stress of the game so you can enjoy the next cut scene.
Who are you to say that someone isn't enjoying a game because they like watching cut scenes, or at least like to know why they are killing a bunch of people in the game? Perhaps it is you who is missing out on the full enjoyment of gaming because without the storyline you are effectively just replaying Doom all the time, but with different maps (and the ability to look up).
Perhaps the next time you rent a movie you setup a timer for every 15 minutes. Watch 15 minutes of the movie when the timer goes off. Walk a mile on a treadmill then go back and watch an other 15 minutes, you will get the same effect.
Here's an even better idea: next time you watch a good action movie, pay attention to how they structure the story so that the action scenes are split up by slower, dialog driven scenes. It is like they have a built-in cut scenes! There are some films that do not do this, but they tend to be at best B-grade films and at worst Z-grade. With cookie-cutter Hollywood films you can probably set your timer and find a very obvious pattern to the scene changes. You will probably find they coincide with where TV stations would insert their ad breaks.
Finally, I don't understand the hate stirred up by cut scenes. All good games should have the ability to skip them (and then display a summary of your new goals when returning to the gameplay). Obviously those games that require dialog decisions from the player can't be skippable, but then those scenes are just another form of gameplay.
Why MS devs need a style guide: they thought the ribbon was a good idea.
Quite frankly, it was. I did have some problems, like the icon that turned out to be a menu (how many people had problems with that?) and Microsoft's refusal to repeat any function on two different tabs (so if something is on the home tab then it cannot appear elsewhere even if it should logically be on that other tab). However, if you watch ordinary people using Office 2003 (or below) then you will notice that they tend to hunt around the toolbars for functions rather than use the menus where you don't need to hover the mouse to read what a button does. The ribbon is perfect for those people. It is also good for tablet users.
The biggest problem people had with the ribbon was that it changed an existing user interface that had not changed substantially since the Windows 3.1 days. All of a sudden, they had to re-learn the package again. That is a pain in the proverbials. However, new users to Office 2007 and 2010 must surely be scratching their heads and wondering what all the fuss was about.
no, it doesn't happen anymore. The original style guide was good...
Which one was the original one? Was it the one for Vista and Windows 7? Or Windows XP? Or this tome for Windows 98, 2000 and XP (which was also available in book format)? And I have this one for Windows 95 on my bookshelf.
I am sure that Windows 3.x had them too. For all the faults of Microsoft, you can't say that they don't like publishing books on how to program their operating systems.
Fast forward to the XAML/WPF/C# era and all that went out the window in favour of "rich" UIs where you have a stupid coloured orb that everyone thinks is decoration until you realise it's the main system menu, and every application has a different set of awful skins.
I agree with you on rise of flashy, non-standard user interfaces, but if you want to adhere to an official style guide now you can still use the ones written for each Windows platform (see my first link).
Who in the hell would want to hire someone exposed to that to work on their software? You would be living in fear of the MS lawsuit.
And yet the program has been in existence for years without a single lawsuit of this nature. It appears that your fears are completely unfounded.
There is also a demo version of JAWS that works fine for testing purposes. It is what I used to test my sites. It is limited to working for 40 minutes before you have to reboot, which is a slight pain but is better than paying a lot of money for the product.
The fact that aDesigner requires "Internet Explorer 6.0 or above", thereby making the tool itself inaccessible to a significant portion of the web development community, is almost too much to bear.
That would be the significant portion that doesn't bother to test their sites with the very quirky browser used by an even more significant portion of their users. Something tells me that if they can't be bothered testing for a large segment of their market, then they would not bother to test for the much smaller segment of visually impaired users.
Yes, how dare GPL developers want to get paid for their software? (Payment is in code instead of money)
Oh look, another childish response. When did I say that GPL developers should not expect people to abide by the terms of their license?
People like you just leave me confused, you effectively claim that releasing software with restricted usage is wrong and short-sighted but then immediately go on to claim that software with restricted usage AND a monetary demand are good and wholesome.
Once again, I did not claim that anything was either wrong nor short-sighted, apart from claiming that someone who writes a non-GPL product will do this so that they can abuse other GPL software. I have made no judgement on any software license. Who could possibly complain when competitive packages exist to fulfill different markets?
Forgive me if I can't think of any word other than "scum" at the moment.
Or it could be about companies trying to avoid violating GPL. It is pretty harsh to call a group of people scum just it is possible that they could do something wrong. Shouldn't you at least wait to see what they do with this new software before calling them names?
According to TFA's comments, the Busybox replacement under discussion is Toybox, written by a former maintainer of Busybox. It cannot be clean room, whether or not that matters.
If the SFC wants to go through the source code line-by-line to look for any similarities so they can claim ownership of the code, then they are quite welcome to do so.
It is a strategy that worked well for SCO, and made them the darling of the software world that you see today!
They'll use the Linux kernel because the Linux kernel community doesn't bother with GPL enforcement.
The big difference is that their custom code that they would want to keep private would most likely be linked into Busybox and not the Linux kernel. This means that they might be quite happy to give out the source code to a mostly unmodified Linux (thus complying with GPL) while still keeping all their secrets by not having to disclose their modifications to busybox.
Making claims that writing their own replacement for busybox means that they will violate the GPL in other ways is the same kind of FUD as when Sony says that jailbreaking a device means you are a pirate, or when Microsoft says that GPL is a cancer. It would be the same as if Microsoft tried to claim that people using Wine did so to pirate Windows software.
The more childish response to anybody complaining about using GPL software in a commercial environment is "if you don't like it, write your own software". Well, that is exactly what Sony want to do. What amazes me is how long it took for anyone to do this. By making a non-GPL version, companies have a choice when creating new products. Now all they need is for someone to develop an alternative to Linux and release it under the BSD license. Now if only we could think of a name for such a project...
The people chosen to be surveyed have been picked from a pool from an online survey company.
It is true that they conduct the survey online, and like all surveys you should be wary of the results (especially when they are conducted for an organisation with an angle). But in this case it is run by a large, established market research company. This is not just a backyard operator extrapolating results from just 50 respondents. The participants come from the same pool of people who take part in their offline market research.
A 8 year increase in the average age of a gamer in 6 years?
Given the huge explosion of gaming capable being owned by traditionally non-gaming people (eg. smartphones, tablets), I don't think that it is too unusual that we should see the average age increase. The report showed the proportion of households with gaming devices increased dramatically over the 6 year period. Consider that back in 2005, most people with children would have already had some gaming device, so the bulk of the increase of households must have come from the older generation. Hence, the average age goes up.
WOW! 194% of Australians are gamers!
That's overpopulation for you!
(And just in case you were serious, it is due to gamers owning more than one gaming device)
A hundred years? A you counting in dog years or something?
The idea that we could warm the planet with our CO2 emissions was first postulated by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. That was the date that I had in mind.
More of the worlwide tendency: governments wanting frantically to control what people see, hear, read, have access to, and do.
Haven't you got that backwards? This is the government making more content available that was previously banned.
Likely a lot of 18+ games will simply never hit the shelves in the original format, as parents will notice they are unsuitable for minors, rather than wallowing ignorance and buying unsuitable games for their children.
I don't think that parents will stop the 18+ games from being stocked. Most of the people I see in the computer game stores are adults. In Australia, the average age of a gamer is 32 years old. 75% of gamers are aged 18 or more. Source: Australian gamers getting older and wiser, Oct 2011, or download the full report.
As an aside, here is a suprising finding from the article:
63 per cent of gaming households play on a dedicated gaming console, 62 per cent play on PC, 43 per cent play on a mobile phone, 13 per cent on a gaming handheld and 13 per cent play games on a tablet computer.
So much for PC gaming being dead.
We came up with Big Brother and exported it to the world :(
No we didn't. It was the Dutch who invented that quality show.
I hope that if I get accused of any crimes that Microsoft absolves me.
As in this case, they will only absolve you of crimes of which they themselves have accused you. This accusation never had any legal backing other than the lawsuit brought about by Microsoft, so it is not as if the company was preempting an official investigation.
So don't go breaking in to your neighbor's house and hope that Microsoft will absolve you of your crime. You will need to become a priest if you are looking for an organisation to shield you from the legal system.
If my job depended on me getting grants to study global warming, then there is going to be a big need to study global warming.
That is some nice circular logic there. The problem is that scientists studying in many different (and not just "global warming") have found evidence to support the theory because it has such widespread effects on the planet.
Also, think of the times where the science has been shown to be wrong. The IPCC repots have had a few mistakes in them, and every single time the mistakes were discovered and published by other scientists. They did this without losing their jobs.
Finally, if science really worked the way that you described, then virtually all science would be bogus. It would not just affect the climate science. But there is absolutely no evidence to support it.
As for your links, the /. post claimed "Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady)." Talk about comparing apple to oranges. 1998 was hotter than any year immediately before or after it. It was not hot due to global warming, but as rgbatduke admits, was due to El Nino. So why use it as a benchmark year? It was an anomaly that should be discounted because of the other forces involved. And as soon as you discount that year, the temperature graph shows that it is still getting hotter. Even without discounting that year, the fact that the recent La Nina year was about the same temperature when that phenomenon should have made it cooler shows that the warming is still occurring.
I looked at the first case study of the second link and found that once the journalists talked to other scientists Aidan Dwyer's so-called breakthrough was debunked a week after the original story broke. I didn't bother reading further when the first point was so easily proven wrong, especially just to respond to an Anonymous Coward in an aging /. story.
Because years ago scientists used to think the earth was the center of our solar system.
This is not an example of scientists being wrong when the average person got it right. Neither is it an example of scientists studying something and coming up with a conclusion. They simply assumed that the Earth was the centre of everything because that was what everyone believed. The problem was that what they observed about the heavens did not match that belief, and a lot of fruitless work went into explaining discrepancy before they threw out those pre-conceived ideas of the universe. At that point, the scientific view diverged from the general public's view in a similar controversial, hotly debated manner as the climate change is today. And look who turned out to be correct then.
In the case of climate change, the observations do match the theory. There is no discrepancy to show any indication that the theory is wrong.
As for the advice on how to put a baby to bed, scientists will publicly admit that they do not have all the answers there. They have never said that it was a fact that you should have your baby in a particular orientation. They will give advice based on surveys and discussion with the parents of babies who died from SIDS. But their knowledge is limited by those damn ethics boards not allowing them to carry out experiments on children!
But once again this is not an example of science knowing less than lay people.
Because the scientists keep forging data to get more funding for their studies, and then poorly concealing their conspiratorial emails about said forging.
This is a claim that has absolutely no evidence to support it. It is an example of the sceptics being less than sceptical when it comes to their own claims.
To be fair: environmental alarmists have batting zero since forever.
I would not call that fair. This entire debate started when someone speculated about the possible impact of our increased CO2 emissions. It was speculated that if this increased the CO2 levels in the atmosphere that there could be a warming effect. It turned out that there was an increased level of CO2 and it was getting warming. That is a win right from the start.
I'm 52 years old, since I was a kid I've been hearing predictions of the earth's oil running out...
Guess what? Oil is running out as predicted. Estimates say that demand will exceed supply by 2020. Most of the estimates had it happening at some time in this decade, but the GFC actually helped here.
...massive widespread starvation due to over population...
According to the World Health Organization, hunger is the biggest threat to public health, and that 6 million children die of hunger every year
...unbreathabe air due to pollution...
There has been lots of work done to fix this, with new laws to reduce emissions by industry and cars. For example, the Great Smog of London in 1952 killed 12,000 people over four days. It directly led to the Clean Air Act of 1956.
...predication of the earth getting much colder...
Global cooling never had much support in the scientific community. These days, the idea of global cooling has been championed by the denialists as a benefit of global warming (to prevents an ice age)
...and much more. None of it has happened. At least not anywhere near the scale it was predicted to happen.
Does "and much more" include the hole in the ozone layer being caused by CFCs being pumped into the atmosphere? Because we used legislation to force industry to find alternatives to CFCs and the ozone layer is now getting smaller. Certainly doesn't sound like they are "batting zero".
I hope that you were just giving an example of what I was talking about earlier. Does anyone really think that scientists had not considered the question of the link between CO2 and global warming, and haven't spent a hundred years studying that exact thing?
And is the fact that Erik the Red gave Greenland an attractive name to convince people to settle there enough "proof" to invalidate the current theories? How did you know that the climate had changed in the past if it were not for the work of climate scientists?