I sincerely doubt that teaching matrices in 7th grade raises "understanding and awareness". As I said, I am a teacher and there's a reason why we don't begin with Maxwell's equations when talking about fields.
Again, difficulty of a subject does not automatically yield deeper understanding. You're making the same mistake as anyone who thinks that there's one way to teach: That there's one single way which works best.

There isn't. Teaching effectiveness depends on the pupil, the teacher, the subject, the classmates and a whole slew of other conditions.

And, to drive the point home: Simply raising the difficulty is a very bad way to go about it. Because you will lose the weaker pupils. You're obviously suffering from the notion that what was good for you must be good for others. I'm seeing this all the time: This notion of intellectual superiority just because you yourself mastered some difficult subject or other. Extrapolating from your subjective viewpoint to a general notion is a very big mistake.

I have to say that you seem to make the mistake of regarding quantity equivalent to quality.

Take your bragging about how many books you had to read. I find it pretty hard to believe that you took anything meaningful from reading alot of quite difficult books. What's the use of reading so many books? And please don't try to tell me that you actually read and not merely skimmed them. I mean, we usually cover one book per month during lessons (if that much) but in detail.

Furthermore, matrices are indeed something you don't really need before university - I fail to see the use for that. That's coming from a Physics and Chemistry teacher, by the way.

And the Bavarian school system is moronic. They recently punished a teacher for having a class that was too good. They wanted her to grade her pupils on a bell curve. Again, "hard" is not the same as "good". And, yes, their results in tests like PISA are better (sometimes). But only because the sample groups are actually not comparable.

Then you were going to the wrong school in Germany. There are quite a lot of "old-language" schools in Germany, I myself went to one of them. We could take latin in 7th grade and old greek in 9th grade (with french being an option in 11th grade).

Vacation time is 6 weeks in summer, 2 in autum, 2 in winter and 2 in spring.

Since it was first synthesized in 1863, I dare say that it's not that hard. You merely need fuming nitric acid to enable the third nitration. No catalysts needed.

Oh, please. Creating explosives is easy (well, the creating part is easy. The "don't blow yourself up prematurely"-part usually not so much).

You merely need nitrating acid which you get by mixing nitric acid and sulfuric acid. Both acids are relatively easy to obtain (Both acids are sold on Amazon over here). Then you mix the nitrating acid with cotton, dry the stuff carefully and you got: Gunpowder Cotton, also called: Smokeless Gunpowder. All you need is a fumehood because mixing the acids is a bit hard on the lungs.

If you want to up the ante: Use glycerin (a laxative, also easily obtainable) instead of cotton. And, you guessed it: You get Nitroglycerin. However, the nitration process is exothermix and you need to be very careful when mixing the acid into the glycerin or it will blow up.

Those are just two examples. Almost the same process is used to produce TNT, by the way.

No, they don't control the hardware and OS. Merely putting out a reference system of sorts does not mean the total control Apple has over their devices.

If you can't see the difference then I can't really help you because it's such a basic and plain difference that a first-grader would recognize it.

Well, that's easy to do if you control both the hardware and the OS. That's not an option for anyone else.

You're wrong. The Windows 8.1 app store does include traditional desktop apps. They're rare but the Adobe Reader XI is in the store.

Also, Microsoft can't very well force companies to only publish through their store...

Actual war zones?

• Let's see: RH 827, 1979 by Simbabwian rebels.
• IR 655, 1988. This was an Iranian airplane during the Iran-Iraq-War. I'm not quite sure how you think that an Iranian plane can avoid flying over Iran?
• 9XR-NN, 1994. The jet of the Ruandian president. Again, how is a Ruandian airplane supposed to avoid Ruanda?

That's about all civilian airliners shot down during an actual war. I'm counting 3 so far. Unless, you also count the Cold War as a hot war.

Whatever. As I said, I'm not a native speaker and to determine affinity towards one side or the other merely through the usage of an article strikes me as foolishness at best.

It actually reminds me of the Jehovah-scene from Life of Brian.

Sorry, but I'm not a native speaker and such intricacies sometimes elude me. Seems strange to me that such a little article makes all the difference, because after all, you yourself call other countries "the US" or "the Netherlands".

And last time I looked both the US and the Netherlands were independent countries.

Yes, they're quoting from those sites. However, they're quoting from both sites. For instance, SpiegelOnline has been very careful to treat such material as moderately unreliable.

That kind of propaganda might help them inside Russia where Putin has almost complete control over the press. But outside? With all the incriminating stuff that's already turned up?

I really don't think that the other major players will be impressed by Russian propaganda. The Ukraine certainly won't. The US won't as well, due to their longstanding tradition of mistrusting Russia, in addition to having lost citizens in the crash. Neither will several states in the EU - the Netherlands won't be happy with an "accident" explanation, particularly in light of the fact that an anti-air missile cannot really be considered an accident.