NASA at a current budget of $17.6 x 10^9 is indeed much bigger than ESA's tiny $5.03 x 10^9 budget. But ESA is not tiny, the Russians are really having a hard time with a budget of only $2.4 x 10^9. Not very suprising given the state of their economy.

That said, in terms of past accomplishments ESA is tiny and is unlikely to ever catch up to either the Russians or the Americans.

While not completely wrong, your statement does seem to skew things somewhat. People in Germany, and Europe in general are quite spoiled from the American perspective.

Practically all students will be able to find some work right after graduation. However, a job in the area of interest, at a location nearby, and at a good salary will be harder to find. So one would have to accept a less than ideal job, or god forbid, start something on their own.

Since most welfare programs in Europe do not require people to under employ and or take a job far away from home (> 100 km), one can afford to be relatively picky. For single person households, welfare is not that difficult to live off (depends on the rent I suppose).

On the other hand, the stigma of unemployment is no less grave here as it is in the USA. Also the inflexibility of the labor marked is such, that it might be better to wait for a job at the right level of education, than be underemployed. For example, it can be harder to find a job at your level once you've accepted a lower-grade job. As a matter of fact, as a recent graduate myself, I do not know any student that has accepted welfare, even if they could not find a proper job for a few months.

Note that all this is changing. Especially in the last few years before the crisis it was hard to justify the bill of welfare given the large number of vacancies. Maybe the crisis will slow change in the labor market, but I doubt it. People have not been moving to the political left in any case.

As always, industry is changing faster than public policy: I can assure you that practically no one will be able to find lifetime employment in his or her first job. Life-time employment was a luxury of the post-war generation that, even in Europe, has ceased to exist outside government circles.

It is in no way fair to compare PyPy, a compiler that actually implements about 95% of Python and is meant to be a drop-in replacement for CPython, to Shed Skin, which only works for specially tailored Python programs.

Also, the funding of PyPy wasn't cut off as you put it. The EU hands out money for research projects with a deadline (usually 2-5 years), not to deliver a marketable product.

Don't forget that, as opposed to CPython, PyPy is primarily a research project meant to explore new compiler and VM technology. This means that most of the developers work on their own extensions, rather than the stability of the core compiler.

That is not to say that your comments are completely unwarranted. Perhaps their development process is not particularly suited to the development of a compiler/interpreter.

Oh and by the way, having built an incomplete Python interpreter myself, I have deep respect for both the people of PyPy and the developer of Shed Skin.

They developed the CD together with Philips, which is a quite successful medium.

Yeah, it's especially funny when you try to get people to explain. Seriously though, it's very hard to understand the spirit of the law when there is no justification whatsoever. In cases like these, we have to either `interpret' the law in context or take it as the word of god. The former is hard to justify without discrediting the source, and the latter is impossible simply because the bible contradicts itself.

Dunno, charging interest isn't the problem of World Wide Depression II, quite the opposite actually, the lack of interest fueled much of it. In any case, you'd think there would be better solutions than simply outlawing interest. Let's do some highly selective quoting, and try to infer the author's motivation.

The word 'brother' is probably one of those words that can be translated and interpreted in a million ways. If we take it literal, it would explain a lot. I for one wouldn't charge interest to money I lend to my brother. I guess the author was just an honest, hard working family man.

But let's assume it was god's foresight into our financial derivatives that motivated Him to forbid interest. Maybe even He couldn't make sense of them either, so he decided to outlaw all of it. Funny thing that all the Christian leaders did not heed His Word. I suppose that's why He decided to punish that one nation under god the most, although that remains to be seen.

One thing I'm sure of. The 'eat no pork' rule has definitely been written by a chicken or cow farmer. Nothing has changed in that respect, the farm lobby is strong as ever.