How many European operators have regional pricing? There is certainly no regional pricing in Norway, where half the population lives in about 15% of the land area and the rest is pretty much empty space (a lot of empty space)
Pitot tubes, even when jammed, are not the only instrumentation a plane has. In this particular case, whatever gyroscope device is available would probably signal that the angle of attack is completely wrong, tubes or no tubes.
But without Pitot tubes, what indication of airspeed does one have? And without airspeed, I would think that it is the computer that just hit the panic button.
No, it was not a Low German dialect. It was what is called an Ingvaeonic dialect, most closely related to Old Saxon and Old Frisian. Old High German is what is sometimes called Istvaeonic (and the Franconian dialects that were to become Dutch is also part of that group). There is a bunch of important differences between Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic, and both are quite, quite different from North Germanic.
Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories?
Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax?
That's just off the top of my head
But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on.
I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.
Also speculating, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of that was due to the fact that the library ecosystem was much smaller then, which means people would be implementing things that you don't have to think too hard about now.
As far as I understand you have more surcharges to fear from European authorities than from Amazon.
Signed - unhappy person living in Norway, where the government is enforcing VAT (which is 25%) on all digital services bought abroad, including ebooks and Apple Store apps. Which is especially lame given that actual books are exempt from VAT (I love actual books, but why the unequal treatment?)
My impression is that a lot of the Python in such a book would be highly non-idiomatic and/or too clever to be considered "good Python practice", which is not a very good idea in a pedagogical setting