Think back to the Microsoft/Sun announcement from a couple years ago, and today, you haven't seen any of the promised technical collaboration from that partnership whatsoever.
This comment alone makes me sceptical about this article, as it is not only incorrect, but easily shown to be false. Just to give one example, anyone who has been following the development of the latest Java release (6) knows that there has been considerable technical collaboration, one result of which is that Java on Vista will be fully integrated with the GUI. Another result is the much enhanced Ms Office compatibility of Star Office. Other results are better networking between Solaris systems and Windows.
No matter what anyone's views are of Sun, Microsoft, or Java, or Solaris or Star Office, to say that the technical collaboration can't be seen is nothing more than strong marketing spin by a commercial Linux vendor, and does not inspire confidence in anything else that is said here. Linux needs better support that this!
Because I have been working with Oracle products since the 80s, and have seen how reliable they are. I have also read regular reliable reports of it being in the highest-performing commercial systems, including ones that need guaranteed integrity.
I didn't say Oracle was a niche application, I said it's expansive abilities were only required by a few niche applications. I.E. - there's more Oracle out there than there is really any call for, because commodity databases are fully capable of satisfying the requirements of many applications that currently use Oracle.
I am really not sure they are. PostgreSQL has great transactional integrity, but not awesome performance. MySQL has great performance, but is still behind on integrity and safety. Oracle has stunning performance and great safety and integrity. It is like the best bits of the commodity databases combined (except for the price!)
If I wanted to start a flame war, I might point out that it might just be that Java is 10x harder to implement and takes 10x the resources, thus 10x the job availability.:)
You could, but as even the Ruby on Rails zealots are only claiming a 5 x boost over working with Java (which I don't believe, as Java apps tend to be much more substantial that RoR apps, at which point good tools and compile-time checking can be valuable), so there would be little basis to this claim.
Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side
Not quite yet.
From dice.com - one of the best known IT job sites.
Today, out of around 96,000 jobs:
Java or J2EE 16,777 ASP 3165 PHP 1216 Ruby on Rails 350
Yes, I know jobs aren't that accurate as a measure of technology use, and there are a lot of smaller PHP projects, and so on, but we are talking about a ratio of Java : PHP of more than 10:1.
PHP is very popular, and will remain so, but to claim it is 'king' of the server-side is wildly exaggerating, it would seem.
Now the FLOSS database solutions are reliable and sophisticated enough that exansive solutions such as Oracle are only required by niche applications. The only thing really keeping them afloat is intertia: there are a number of talented Oracle DBA's who would like to continue using what they know; and there is a stable of important applications which will continue to certify Oracle for some time. It will take time for existing application vendors to migrate to commodity backends, but it is very much in their best interest to do so.
I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the database market. Oracle is not niche - it is mainstream. It is one of the databases that a company uses when it must have very high uptimes and guaranteed performance. Companies that do on-line commerce are not like blog sites or forums, where the occasional delay or timeout is merely an inconvenience. For even smaller companies, the cost of Oracle is trivial compared to company turnover or staff salaries.
I really love PostgreSQL and use it for most of my development, but there is no way I would use it to host a high-performance site running financial transactions. PostgreSQL may well be good enough, but the key word is 'may'. I can be sure that Oracle is.
If falling perpetually at 17000 miles per hour is so easy, lets see you do it!
I already am - far faster in fact. So are you. That is the Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun.
Consider these. Supply missions and such have to achieve this velocity, too.
Yes, but that is their problem, not the space station's. Now it has this velocity, it is relatively stable.
There is a lot of manmade debris, not to mention natural hazards.
Yes, but not much physical stress.
Orbiting the Earth is not a simple groove in which the ISS slides by day in and day out.
Actually, that is precisely what it is! It requires very little energy to maintain.
Orbit is a carefully calculated and obsessively maintained state of teetering on escape from gravity and orbital collapse into the atmosphere; thus, the orbit is a stressful, chaotic, dangerous and relatively unpredictable state for a floating flophouse.
No, it isn't. It is very predictable indeed; so predictable it can be used for some of the finest measurements. Orbits are not a fine balance. Once in orbit, it is very hard to remove something from it. Put lots of energy in an you simply change the dimensions of the orbit - it certainly is nothing like 'teetering on escape from gravity' - that would require phenomenal energy input, as would a quick collapse of orbit. The only problem is a slow decay of orbit due to friction from the remnants of atmosphere at the altitude of the ISS.
Care to belittle the program a little more, doctor? Go ahead and make another comparison between standing on the earth and venturing into space.
I am not belittling the space program - I am a very enthusiastic supporter, and seem to be one of the few left who still think the ISS is a good idea.
Anything in orbit is in a constant state of free-fall.
I know. That is my point. Being in free-fall, there are virtually no forces acting on it. So, the implication in the GP post that surviving 'falling at high speed' should somehow be an achievement is mistaken.
How is this a factor? It is in orbit, and relatively stable. It is not as if it is blasting rockets to keep that speed, or rushing through atmosphere at that speed.
Just standing still anywhere on the equator, a human is moving at 1040 miles per hour..... is our survival somehow an achievement as a result?
Ruby already runs on the JVM, in the form of Ruby, and there are already Smalltalk compilers and systems for the JVM.
The story is interesting, as a JVM implementation could help with various issues that have been around in Ruby for some time. For example JRuby will almost certainly be compiling to byte codes (and so amenable to considerable optimisation) on the JVM before Ruby 2.0 with it's VM is out and stable. JRuby also uses native threads, and the Java connection means it is likely to be easier to implement internationalisation. Sun has also said it is keen to produce good tools for JRuby, to match those currently available for Java. This competition will be good for Ruby!
So commenting negatively about Microsoft's poor legacy API support is 'Trolling', and then trying to refute the 'Trolling' claim by asking for a reasoned discussion is 'off topic'?
Interesting moderation of my original post here - "Troll".
Perhaps people who disagree with me might actually like to challenge facts rather than abuse their mod points?
How can stating established issues (known to any developer who has been working with Microsoft tools, good though some of those tools have been - nothing I have said here is controversial) be "Trolling" - some strange new Slashdot definition of the term?
But that is not the point. Some of APIs you were using are gone. The issue was about Microsoft's supposed first-rate support for old APIs, not how good new APIs and tools are.
Microsoft has had an excellent reputation for backward API compatibility (better than any other software vendor on the planet).
As someone who has been using Microsoft's development products since the 70s (I started with the Macro Assembler on the TRS-80!) I can say I completely disagree. They freely abandon APIs and products, leaving developers stranded. Just ask PenWindows developers. Look back at the mess that was Win32s, and the painful upgrade path from earlier Windows versions(I have Win16 apps from the early 90s that simply won't run on XP). Just look at how they have left VB6 developers stranded.
Meanwhile, on Linux, I am using APIs and tools that were around in UNIX in the 70s.
Gosh, you sure put me in my place. I must be the only one calling for the IPCC to fund bringing the proxies up to date. The fact that it is currently referred to as "The greatest scandal in climate science" and that a group of over 1,000 scientists with PhD's have called for the proxies to be updated is no excuse for my egotistical call for the same.
Wow! 1000 scientists 'with PhD's'. Sorry, but a PhD does not a scientist make. I know, as I have a PhD in science. This means nothing, sorry.
I have an idea - why not get involved in a petition to ask the artic ice to stop thinning? Or the Siberian permafrost to stop melting?
Clearly, asking for researchers to present all their data is a cruel, heartless, and unfair thing to do. The fact that Mann's last paper contained a folder in his data labeled "CENSORED" is not a sign of intellectual dishonesty, but merely a sign of protection from my own ignorance. That it required an act of Congress to make him publish his publicly funded data and methodology is clearly the way science should be done. I mean, that's not the exact same thing that you rabidly accuse the tobacco industry (rightly) of doing.
Wow! A conspiracy theory! Excellent! I was just waiting for another to come along.
Of course, climate science consists of far, far more than Mann's data (which has been controversial for some time). It is less controversial now, of course.
So, mea culpa, mea culpa.
If only that were true, but the fact you are misrepresenting things yet again proves otherwise.
To cherry-pick individual reports or papers and assume that they represent anything in general is NOT science. Science is about consensus.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. But I didn't think that science worked on consensus. I thought science worked on verification of repeatable tests. No consensus necessary. As soon as you rely on "consensus" to determine the truth, aren't you stepping more into the realm of politics than science?
No, because in science the consensus is about things such as the quality of the tests, and the quality of the verification. A scientific consensus occurs when the majority agree that repeatable tests have been verified.
Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
He is totally wrong. Science does not require only one investigator who produces verifiable tests. No matter how much tests seem to be verified in one environment or laboratory, they are of no use unless they are verified elsewhere by other investigators - just look at what happened to cold fusion.
He is wrong about the greatest scientists breaking with convention. The greatest we know of - Newton and Einstein, all worked using established ideas, and often not alone (much of Newton's work was paralleled by Liebniz, and Newton followed Kepler). Einstein based much of his work on that of Maxwell.
In science consensus is fundamental.
But anyway, why are you quoting a science fiction author about this - it is not like he even writes good science in his fiction?
The sheer arrogance of some individuals to believe that they alone can see through all the supposed 'uncertainty' of research and evidence and come out with the truth, is unbelievable. Their egos must be something to behold.... (and no, just because science has been occasionally driven forward by individuals does NOT mean you are right, poor slashdot posters.... you aren't Einstein or Hawking).
Al Gore just told me I have ten years until the ice caps melt and Florida is under water. New York in 50 years, Half the U.S. by 2100.
No, he says no such thing, of course. You are wildly exaggerating. It is going to take a very long time for all ice to melt, and no-one is claiming otherwise (although the Artic is expected to be clear of sea ice during summers in a few decades).
But in your world, it takes 800 years to melt a few glaciers a few percent.
No. That 800 years was for the termination of an entire ice age. What we have left now is a fraction of that volume of ice, and the melting of even a minor proportion of that is going to cause problems.
Who's right? Where's all that consensus I keep hearing about? And that's just the easy hole to poke in your "consensus" of climate science.
There is a consensus, but if you don't want to believe it, it is easy to just put your head in the sand. Also, you don't poke holes in a consensus by posting exaggerated nonsense.
Oh, and the Antarctic ice cap is increasing in mass by more than the Artic ice cap is melting. Sorry again. (No citation, get off your own ass and look it up.)
No, it isn't, sorry.
Washington post, March this year:
"The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking significantly."
The ice sheet was indeed growing slightly to date due to increased precipitation due to increased atmospheric moisure, due in turn to global warming, but we have managed to reverse even that effect, far sooner than we thought.
I wish I could understand the motivation of global warming disbelievers. I can just about understand those who might put forward arguments about doing little about it for now, for economic reasons, even though I strongly disagree. But to simply ignore the fact that it is happening, or for some posters to think that they as individuals are right or have uncovered some fact that thousands of experienced researches haven't (typically "They forgot about solar cycles") is plain barmy.
In fact, it's more correctly stated that CO2 levels tend to lag behind climate changes by up to 900 years.
That is irrelevant, because the climate changes you are talking about may not have been caused by primarily CO2 changes. Not all climate changes are due to the same thing. There can be solar intensity changes, orbital and axis inclination changes, changes in continental positions and water flows and so on.
To take one climatic change - a deglaciation, and claim that because climate changed lagged a CO2 increase there, that changes lag all CO2 increases is plain nonsense.
To them, apparently, man made CO2 causes instant warming, but natural CO2 takes up to 800 years to have an effect.
No. All CO2 has a more or less instant effect. But glaciation cycles involve more than just CO2 changes, and even an instant change in heat balance can take a long time to impact huge masses of ice - what do you expect - all the ice to melt in a few years? Also, what CO2 has an instant effect on is the infrared radiation balance, not temperature. This is often misunderstood. If you blast a bucket of ice with heat, it will take a long time before the temperature changes sufficiently (the melting of the ice absorbs heat).
What we are talking about with the current situation is the impact of a change in CO2 when other effects are either constant, or taken into account (such as solar cycles). We also don't have huge ice caps to absorb most of that heat as in your example (although the ones we have are doing so to some extent by melting slowly).
That's a bit of a straw man isn't it? Why don't they build some heavy lift vehicles?
They have. Several pieces of the ISS have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets. The problem is that the entire launching strategy was pre-planned, with some parts launched and deployed by Shuttle, some by other vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Think back to the Microsoft/Sun announcement from a couple years ago, and today, you haven't seen any of the promised technical collaboration from that partnership whatsoever.
This comment alone makes me sceptical about this article, as it is not only incorrect, but easily shown to be false. Just to give one example, anyone who has been following the development of the latest Java release (6) knows that there has been considerable technical collaboration, one result of which is that Java on Vista will be fully integrated with the GUI. Another result is the much enhanced Ms Office compatibility of Star Office. Other results are better networking between Solaris systems and Windows.
No matter what anyone's views are of Sun, Microsoft, or Java, or Solaris or Star Office, to say that the technical collaboration can't be seen is nothing more than strong marketing spin by a commercial Linux vendor, and does not inspire confidence in anything else that is said here. Linux needs better support that this!
What makes you so sure?
Because I have been working with Oracle products since the 80s, and have seen how reliable they are. I have also read regular reliable reports of it being in the highest-performing commercial systems, including ones that need guaranteed integrity.
I didn't say Oracle was a niche application, I said it's expansive abilities were only required by a few niche applications. I.E. - there's more Oracle out there than there is really any call for, because commodity databases are fully capable of satisfying the requirements of many applications that currently use Oracle.
I am really not sure they are. PostgreSQL has great transactional integrity, but not awesome performance. MySQL has great performance, but is still behind on integrity and safety. Oracle has stunning performance and great safety and integrity. It is like the best bits of the commodity databases combined (except for the price!)
If I wanted to start a flame war, I might point out that it might just be that Java is 10x harder to implement and takes 10x the resources, thus 10x the job availability. :)
You could, but as even the Ruby on Rails zealots are only claiming a 5 x boost over working with Java (which I don't believe, as Java apps tend to be much more substantial that RoR apps, at which point good tools and compile-time checking can be valuable), so there would be little basis to this claim.
Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side
Not quite yet.
From dice.com - one of the best known IT job sites.
Today, out of around 96,000 jobs:
Java or J2EE 16,777
ASP 3165
PHP 1216
Ruby on Rails 350
Yes, I know jobs aren't that accurate as a measure of technology use, and there are a lot of smaller PHP projects, and so on, but we are talking about a ratio of Java : PHP of more than 10:1.
PHP is very popular, and will remain so, but to claim it is 'king' of the server-side is wildly exaggerating, it would seem.
Now the FLOSS database solutions are reliable and sophisticated enough that exansive solutions such as Oracle are only required by niche applications. The only thing really keeping them afloat is intertia: there are a number of talented Oracle DBA's who would like to continue using what they know; and there is a stable of important applications which will continue to certify Oracle for some time. It will take time for existing application vendors to migrate to commodity backends, but it is very much in their best interest to do so.
I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the database market. Oracle is not niche - it is mainstream. It is one of the databases that a company uses when it must have very high uptimes and guaranteed performance. Companies that do on-line commerce are not like blog sites or forums, where the occasional delay or timeout is merely an inconvenience. For even smaller companies, the cost of Oracle is trivial compared to company turnover or staff salaries.
I really love PostgreSQL and use it for most of my development, but there is no way I would use it to host a high-performance site running financial transactions. PostgreSQL may well be good enough, but the key word is 'may'. I can be sure that Oracle is.
Having proofs of ancient life on Mars would have put us a step nearer the alien contact.
Only if it could be shown that this life had a different origin from that on Earth.
Sun is heading down a road of over-complexity fatware adding little or no value, their market share will shrink as a result.
It seems that many don't share your view, as their market share is currently increasing.
To me, it sounds physically impossible when described that way. What do you think?
That anecdote is physically impossible.
That is the Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun.
Of course, what I meant is 'that is LESS than the Earth's orbital velocity'.
If falling perpetually at 17000 miles per hour is so easy, lets see you do it!
I already am - far faster in fact. So are you. That is the Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun.
Consider these. Supply missions and such have to achieve this velocity, too.
Yes, but that is their problem, not the space station's. Now it has this velocity, it is relatively stable.
There is a lot of manmade debris, not to mention natural hazards.
Yes, but not much physical stress.
Orbiting the Earth is not a simple groove in which the ISS slides by day in and day out.
Actually, that is precisely what it is! It requires very little energy to maintain.
Orbit is a carefully calculated and obsessively maintained state of teetering on escape from gravity and orbital collapse into the atmosphere; thus, the orbit is a stressful, chaotic, dangerous and relatively unpredictable state for a floating flophouse.
No, it isn't. It is very predictable indeed; so predictable it can be used for some of the finest measurements. Orbits are not a fine balance. Once in orbit, it is very hard to remove something from it. Put lots of energy in an you simply change the dimensions of the orbit - it certainly is nothing like 'teetering on escape from gravity' - that would require phenomenal energy input, as would a quick collapse of orbit. The only problem is a slow decay of orbit due to friction from the remnants of atmosphere at the altitude of the ISS.
Care to belittle the program a little more, doctor? Go ahead and make another comparison between standing on the earth and venturing into space.
I am not belittling the space program - I am a very enthusiastic supporter, and seem to be one of the few left who still think the ISS is a good idea.
What I object to is bad reporting of science.
Anything in orbit is in a constant state of free-fall.
I know. That is my point. Being in free-fall, there are virtually no forces acting on it. So, the implication in the GP post that surviving 'falling at high speed' should somehow be an achievement is mistaken.
falling perpetually at 17000 miles per hour.
How is this a factor? It is in orbit, and relatively stable. It is not as if it is blasting rockets to keep that speed, or rushing through atmosphere at that speed.
Just standing still anywhere on the equator, a human is moving at 1040 miles per hour..... is our survival somehow an achievement as a result?
Ruby already runs on the JVM, in the form of Ruby, and there are already Smalltalk compilers and systems for the JVM.
The story is interesting, as a JVM implementation could help with various issues that have been around in Ruby for some time. For example JRuby will almost certainly be compiling to byte codes (and so amenable to considerable optimisation) on the JVM before Ruby 2.0 with it's VM is out and stable. JRuby also uses native threads, and the Java connection means it is likely to be easier to implement internationalisation. Sun has also said it is keen to produce good tools for JRuby, to match those currently available for Java. This competition will be good for Ruby!
So commenting negatively about Microsoft's poor legacy API support is 'Trolling', and then trying to refute the 'Trolling' claim by asking for a reasoned discussion is 'off topic'?
Awesome. Slashdot has just lost it.
Interesting moderation of my original post here - "Troll".
Perhaps people who disagree with me might actually like to challenge facts rather than abuse their mod points?
How can stating established issues (known to any developer who has been working with Microsoft tools, good though some of those tools have been - nothing I have said here is controversial) be "Trolling" - some strange new Slashdot definition of the term?
But that is not the point. Some of APIs you were using are gone. The issue was about Microsoft's supposed first-rate support for old APIs, not how good new APIs and tools are.
Microsoft has had an excellent reputation for backward API compatibility (better than any other software vendor on the planet).
As someone who has been using Microsoft's development products since the 70s (I started with the Macro Assembler on the TRS-80!) I can say I completely disagree. They freely abandon APIs and products, leaving developers stranded. Just ask PenWindows developers. Look back at the mess that was Win32s, and the painful upgrade path from earlier Windows versions(I have Win16 apps from the early 90s that simply won't run on XP). Just look at how they have left VB6 developers stranded.
Meanwhile, on Linux, I am using APIs and tools that were around in UNIX in the 70s.
Gosh, you sure put me in my place. I must be the only one calling for the IPCC to fund bringing the proxies up to date. The fact that it is currently referred to as "The greatest scandal in climate science" and that a group of over 1,000 scientists with PhD's have called for the proxies to be updated is no excuse for my egotistical call for the same.
Wow! 1000 scientists 'with PhD's'. Sorry, but a PhD does not a scientist make. I know, as I have a PhD in science. This means nothing, sorry.
I have an idea - why not get involved in a petition to ask the artic ice to stop thinning? Or the Siberian permafrost to stop melting?
Clearly, asking for researchers to present all their data is a cruel, heartless, and unfair thing to do. The fact that Mann's last paper contained a folder in his data labeled "CENSORED" is not a sign of intellectual dishonesty, but merely a sign of protection from my own ignorance. That it required an act of Congress to make him publish his publicly funded data and methodology is clearly the way science should be done. I mean, that's not the exact same thing that you rabidly accuse the tobacco industry (rightly) of doing.
Wow! A conspiracy theory! Excellent! I was just waiting for another to come along.
Of course, climate science consists of far, far more than Mann's data (which has been controversial for some time). It is less controversial now, of course.
So, mea culpa, mea culpa.
If only that were true, but the fact you are misrepresenting things yet again proves otherwise.
To cherry-pick individual reports or papers and assume that they represent anything in general is NOT science. Science is about consensus.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. But I didn't think that science worked on consensus. I thought science worked on verification of repeatable tests. No consensus necessary. As soon as you rely on "consensus" to determine the truth, aren't you stepping more into the realm of politics than science?
No, because in science the consensus is about things such as the quality of the tests, and the quality of the verification. A scientific consensus occurs when the majority agree that repeatable tests have been verified.
Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
He is totally wrong. Science does not require only one investigator who produces verifiable tests. No matter how much tests seem to be verified in one environment or laboratory, they are of no use unless they are verified elsewhere by other investigators - just look at what happened to cold fusion.
He is wrong about the greatest scientists breaking with convention. The greatest we know of - Newton and Einstein, all worked using established ideas, and often not alone (much of Newton's work was paralleled by Liebniz, and Newton followed Kepler). Einstein based much of his work on that of Maxwell.
In science consensus is fundamental.
But anyway, why are you quoting a science fiction author about this - it is not like he even writes good science in his fiction?
Superb post!
The sheer arrogance of some individuals to believe that they alone can see through all the supposed 'uncertainty' of research and evidence and come out with the truth, is unbelievable. Their egos must be something to behold.... (and no, just because science has been occasionally driven forward by individuals does NOT mean you are right, poor slashdot posters.... you aren't Einstein or Hawking).
Al Gore just told me I have ten years until the ice caps melt and Florida is under water. New York in 50 years, Half the U.S. by 2100.
No, he says no such thing, of course. You are wildly exaggerating. It is going to take a very long time for all ice to melt, and no-one is claiming otherwise (although the Artic is expected to be clear of sea ice during summers in a few decades).
But in your world, it takes 800 years to melt a few glaciers a few percent.
No. That 800 years was for the termination of an entire ice age. What we have left now is a fraction of that volume of ice, and the melting of even a minor proportion of that is going to cause problems.
Who's right? Where's all that consensus I keep hearing about? And that's just the easy hole to poke in your "consensus" of climate science.
There is a consensus, but if you don't want to believe it, it is easy to just put your head in the sand. Also, you don't poke holes in a consensus by posting exaggerated nonsense.
Oh, and the Antarctic ice cap is increasing in mass by more than the Artic ice cap is melting. Sorry again. (No citation, get off your own ass and look it up.)
No, it isn't, sorry.
Washington post, March this year:
"The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year in a trend that scientists link to global warming, according to a new paper that provides the first evidence that the sheet's total mass is shrinking significantly."
The ice sheet was indeed growing slightly to date due to increased precipitation due to increased atmospheric moisure, due in turn to global warming, but we have managed to reverse even that effect, far sooner than we thought.
I wish I could understand the motivation of global warming disbelievers. I can just about understand those who might put forward arguments about doing little about it for now, for economic reasons, even though I strongly disagree. But to simply ignore the fact that it is happening, or for some posters to think that they as individuals are right or have uncovered some fact that thousands of experienced researches haven't (typically "They forgot about solar cycles") is plain barmy.
In fact, it's more correctly stated that CO2 levels tend to lag behind climate changes by up to 900 years.
That is irrelevant, because the climate changes you are talking about may not have been caused by primarily CO2 changes. Not all climate changes are due to the same thing. There can be solar intensity changes, orbital and axis inclination changes, changes in continental positions and water flows and so on.
To take one climatic change - a deglaciation, and claim that because climate changed lagged a CO2 increase there, that changes lag all CO2 increases is plain nonsense.
To them, apparently, man made CO2 causes instant warming, but natural CO2 takes up to 800 years to have an effect.
No. All CO2 has a more or less instant effect. But glaciation cycles involve more than just CO2 changes, and even an instant change in heat balance can take a long time to impact huge masses of ice - what do you expect - all the ice to melt in a few years? Also, what CO2 has an instant effect on is the infrared radiation balance, not temperature. This is often misunderstood. If you blast a bucket of ice with heat, it will take a long time before the temperature changes sufficiently (the melting of the ice absorbs heat).
What we are talking about with the current situation is the impact of a change in CO2 when other effects are either constant, or taken into account (such as solar cycles). We also don't have huge ice caps to absorb most of that heat as in your example (although the ones we have are doing so to some extent by melting slowly).
That's a bit of a straw man isn't it? Why don't they build some heavy lift vehicles?
They have. Several pieces of the ISS have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets. The problem is that the entire launching strategy was pre-planned, with some parts launched and deployed by Shuttle, some by other vehicles.
How's about the rest of the world waste some of their cash to build rockets to pick up the slack?
They have been. Since the Columbia disaster the station has been largely serviced by Russian Soyuz spacecraft.