I learned Thai by living with a Thai girl who spoke no English. Took about 6 months to become fluent. My suggestion is get a "long haired dictionary" and you'll pick up the language in no time. :)
The best way to learn is to have no choice but to speak the language. Then don't be afraid to fail. I learned Indonesian by speaking to taxi drivers and any other locals I came in contact with. Same process I used with Javanese.
The trick is to start with a basic vocabulary and set of phrases. Then treat the phrases as templates and swap words in and out. You'll be wrong a lot, but the native speaker might phrase it correctly and repeat it back... just repeat what they said and smile. Repeat this process until you're fluent. :)
Firstly, US companies tends not to care about other countries. To the extent that they do, it is mostly European countries that are important. The reason is pretty simple -- money. First world countries can (and will) pay for things. It is generally more useful to have paying customers as your user base. (Here I include customers of other products, i.e. "eyeballs" that you can sell to advertisers. Advertisers want access to people who buy products.)
Secondly, the third world has shown rather resoundingly that it doesn't want non-Microsoft products. Here in Thailand I routinely see Thai people install Windows XP onto their iMacs and Macbooks. They don't use OSX, and I have never met a Thai using Linux. Even laptops which are supposed to have Linux pre-installed will routinely have XP installed by the shop before they are sold.
Here, the reasoning is a bit more complex. For starters, Thai language support. XP has very good Thai support (i.e. it actually has a Thai language locale). OSX does not at all, and Linux has extremely half-assed Thai language support. Obviously, Thailand isn't an important market to Apple and Linux using Thais haven't stepped up to do the translation. This is a unique issue for Thais, so we can ignore it for the general "Third World". I would suggest, however, that most Third World users don't speak English as a first language. Some African countries will do ok with French or English (or German!) locales, so we'll leave it at that.
Besides language issues, the main issue I've encountered here in Thailand is that Thai people want to learn marketable computer skills. They believe that since everyone uses Windows and Office, if they learn, for example, Linux and Open Office, they will have the wrong skill set. They want to emulate the West so they can be successful, and the West uses Microsoft. Thats what they want to use too.
Microsoft is quite deeply ingrained into the computing culture over here. If a Thai wants to add you to their IM list, they will ask you "do you have M?" <<are you on M[SN Messenger]?>>. Alternatively, they might just say "add email someusername42" <<add the MSN Messenger contact someusername42[@hotmail.com]>>. Microsoft defaults are just assumed (MSN Messenger, hotmail.com, etc.)
So, given that OSX and Linux can't penetrate into the third world (and in Apple's case, probably don't even want to)... why would you assume that Chrome OS will? That is, assuming that Google even cares (which is a huge assumption)...
Here is a good article on trying to live on 30k a month. It is a pretty frugal lifestyle actually. Lots of toast for breakfast, not a lot of ordering Au Bon Pain.
Well, 4k USD per month is ~130k THB. The purchasing power of the Baht means that that is about equivalent to ~10k USD. (As an example, a can of Coke costs 12 THB in a 7/11).
130k will buy you a lot of luxury in Thailand. You can get a very good condo for 30k per month. You can each out for every meal of every day for about 1.5k per diem, so 45k for food. That still leaves 55k for spending on going out, buying clothes, utilities, gadgets, etc. etc. That is more than "comfortable".
Even 70k per month is more than enough for a very comfortable lifestyle. Local food costs < 100 THB per meal, so you could eat for less than 300 THB per day. A reasonable condo is only 20k if you're willing to live away from the tourist areas.
You know, you can have a car in other countries as well. In Jakarta you can have a car and driver for less than the cost of a car in the US.
Personally, I think everyone should live in a different country for at least one (1) year. You'll gain a lot of perspective on your own country in the process. Just like learning another language teaches you more about your native tongue, so living in another country teach you about your own culture. Combine the two (new language, new country) for a serious eye opening.
For example, the Thai language has no words for "yes" or "no". There are no yes/no questions in Thai.
Only after being removed from pervasive US media do you recognize how much hollywood movie content is US centric and self-referential.
Honestly, if you love living in the US, go live somewhere else in the world for one year. You'll either love the US more, or you'll decide that you enjoy living somewhere else more than you anticipated. Either way, you'll have gained invaluable life experience.
What is the basis for your claim that "there are no yes/no questions in Thai"?
(It does seem that binary questions aren't treated the same way in Thai as they are in English -- the conventions for how you say yes and no are different in different cases -- but it doesn't look at all as if there are "no yes/no questions". For that matter, even in English there are some binary questions to which "yes" and "no" would be peculiar answers. For instance, questions that implicitly make an offer ("Would you like one of these?") usually have to be answered more politely.)
Actually, I speak fluent Thai, there is no word for Yes or No. There is ไม่ which is a negation word, and ใช่ which basically means "correct"/"right", not "yes". The Thai question format is generally:
Q: Hungry? หิวไหม
A: Not hungry. ไม่หิว
A: Hungry. หิว
There are other question indicator words, but the one you're referring to is for "correct or not" type questions, e.g.
Q: This road, right? สอยนี้ใช่ไหม
A: Right. ใช่
A: Not right. ไม่ใช่
Alternatively, for a lot of statements you can just respond with the polite ending words, ครับ for men and ค่ะ for women.
The question, "would you like one of these?" in Thai would be, "เอาไหม่"... literally, "want?". The correct response is then either: ไม่เอาครับ or, เอาครับ ... that is the polite form for "do not want", or "want". There is no other way to respond to that question (except without the polite ending).
Those things you describe are all yes/no questions, so it is not true that there are no yes/no questions in Thai. And what you've described are ways to give (for particular classes of question) answers that mean just the same as "yes" or "no" would for the corresponding questions in English.
It's interesting that English has a category (call it "standard binary questions, answerable with yes or no") that doesn't correspond exactly to anything in Thai. But from what you've said it seems entirely wrong to describe that situation by saying that Thai has no yes/no questions.
My wife is Thai, and I manage to speak thai a bit. I took several months of thai lessons. I confirm what has been said before. There is no yes/no word in thai. Those examples on those sites are just bad translation for beginners.
For example the word "chai" that they give for "yes" is more close to "true" when you agree with what has been said.
"Chai" is just a particular answer that can be given to a particular question. You can't use it as a "yes" answer to all question.
Living in Thailand doesn't mean you have to work in Thailand. That is the crucial difference...
I live here (Thailand) and do contract work at near western rates. That means I can live for months off the revenue from a single project.
To be fair though, the cost of living in Thailand is higher than the article makes out. Rent is quite high (if you want to live in a good location), and having western food all the time gets expensive. Expect to spend about 30k THB per month on ChefXP and FoodByPhone.
As for a variety of foods, Bangkok is hard to beat. Except for the lack of decent mexican food (Sunrise Taco should be burned down), we have pretty much anything you could want to eat... and it can be delivered to your door w/in 45minutes for less than you'd pay in the US.
Bangkok is a 24hr city. You can get good food any time day or night. There are always things to do no matter what the hour... ผมรักกรูงเทพฯมากๆเลย
I've lived on 4 continents (Africa, N. America, Europe, Asia), and I seriously believe that Thailand is the best country for living.
I can confirm that. Bangkok/Thailand can be both very cheap and extremely expensive, depends on what you eat, how you live. If you adjust your taste to thai food, you can get by pretty cheap, but even if you eat moderately fast food western food here and there like 112 pizza, food court in MBK (has great greek lamb!) toll can get up high pretty fast.
Living in BKK is another story, you can buy a decent house in a decent neighborhood for about 4 mil baht, which is cheap in my book. I have, due to the nature of my work, lived in nearby Salaya and commuted to shooting location and BKK with designated driver, prices of living there (only a 30 minute drive from BKK) are significantly lower than in BKK.
I haven't read the slides, so I can't say specifically what he's done, however this is nothing new [1]. Essentially, he has ported a known technique, for executing programs within a host address space, to the OS X platform. It is neither "new" nor an "attack", so the article is extremely misleading.
From the article it appears that he's implemented a framework for injecting code into another process on OSX. It sounds like he uses the original binary to either a) hook execution, or b) access dynamic libraries[2]. [The part about using addresses from the existing Mach-O binary isn't clear as to the purposed purpose].
This "attack" is actually more like a technique for running a binary without creating an on-disk image. For examples of why you'd want to do this see phrack [3].
