The total effective tax-rate (national+municipal) in Japan for entry-level workers is under 20% unless you work a ridiculous amount of overtime, and even then it wont be much more. Unlike US jobs, most salaried positions in Japan pay overtime after the 40th hour.
I also work in Japan, and I've always been treated politely. Of course, there's the occasional politician who announces that all crime in Tokyo is committed by foreigners, but real people tend to be a lot more level-headed.
It's nice that most of them are polite (okay, except some politicians) but how many are friendly, how do they see foreigners staying for very long (or maybe forever?) in Japan or even marrying a girl (daughter?)? During my years in Germany, I have observed the politeness and sometimes friendlyness but, after meeting new people, most of them would ask me "And, when do you go back home?". (BTW: Almost every foreigner who lives there - even those born there but with african, asian or other non-white roots - reported the same experience)
> During my years in Germany, I have observed the politeness and sometimes friendlyness but, after meeting new people, most of them would ask me "And, when do you go back home?".
I wouldn't read too much into it. I'm white (living in Austria) and I also get a lot of questions like that from people I just met (although it's normally "do you want to go back home?" rather than "when are you going home?").
I think that in countries for which immigration is a relatively new phenomenon (unlike the US/Canada/Australia/etc) people are in some unconscious way more reluctant to believe that it's actually possible for people to move to another country.
Last big immigration wave is happening in Germany for almost 50 years (Austria is probably similar) and, considering negative birthrate, it's clear that in a few decades there will be less Germans (or Japanese, as both countries - ironically - lead the statistic). Under these circumstances, it doesn't seem logical to (still) ask foreigners dumb questions.
Not a few of those who asked me that question (or the version you quoted) have lived in other countries and are otherwise open minded. Still, probably subconsciously, they see someone (even if s/he's white) as some kind of different person. Yes, US/CAN/AUS are different and that's why their birthrate is sinking but it will not get negative in the coming decades.
I'm from Germany and can tell you: It means that person is interested in you, your life and your background. It does NOT mean "go home!". Also, Germans probably don't expect that other people like it there.
> It means that person is interested in you, your life and your background. It does NOT mean "go home!".
It doesn't mean "go home!", it's much subtler. But it surely does NOT show "interested in you, your life and your background".
> Germans probably don't expect that other people like it there.
(Danke für die Vorlage)
If you live abroad a quick test for you: Imagine, in the country where you live, you get asked the same question(s)? How would you feel? And then (on the top of that) one of the natives even says we "don't expect that you like it here". Quite subtle...
The only remarkable thing about the equity being asked for is the anti-dilution provision. I don't think he's suggesting you ask for liquidation preference or participating preference (which wouldn't make any sense).
Anti-dillution is there to prevent unscrupulous partners from buying tons of equity (issuing new shares) at absurdly low prices just to dilute you.
Definitely should be clarified in the article, though. I had no clue what as converted meant despite some casual research into common terms. I doubt people totally new to term sheets would have a clue about participation based on what's there now.
The really impressive thing about Photosynth is how far it has come in the last year. It used to take hours to weeks to create synths from hundreds of pictures. The processing time is dominated by
1. Keypoint detection (SIFT or a similar algorithm)
2. Keypoint matching for each pair of images with
approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search on kd-trees
3. Structure from motion to recover rotation and the relative location of photos
Any details available on how they're speeding up each of these steps? The only research publications I see are the original work and the new 'finding paths' paper presented last week at Siggraph.
Yeah, the papers only discuss how they combine known algorithms[1]. They could be speeding up the process using any combination of these:
1. Using the order of the images to reduce matching from O(N^2) to something closer to O(N) since people are more likely to take pictures sequentially instead of randomly. I'm going to run some tests next time I boot into Windows.
2. Running keypoint detection as the images are uploaded and potentially slowing down the upload speed to make it appear more seamless.
3. New keypoint detection algorithm for constant-time speedup. SURF, for instance, is about 5x faster than SIFT.
4. Using GPUs. The keypoint detection and matching steps are perfect for running on parallel GPUs. A couple recent papers showed 10-15x speedup for keypoint detection and KD-tree construction and search on GPUs, compared to similarly priced CPUs.
Any other ideas?
[1] There's also a new paper called Skeletal graphs for efficient structure from motion that discusses a neat graph algorithm for the SfM step.
I've noticed intelligence is respected but conformity is respected much, much more.
From a recent article titled "Why Apple isn't Japanese"
"One notorious case in point involves Shuji Nakamura, the brilliant scientist who invented a revolutionary energy-saving blue-diode light source only to find himself mired in years of litigation as he struggled to extract royalty payments from the company that had profited from his invention. Nakamura ultimately abandoned Japan for California. Fasol recalls asking scientists at the University of Tokyo if they considered his departure a blow. " 'No, not at all,' they told me. 'It might be good to have someone more ordinary'." "
I know you'd rather be there in person, but here's the next best thing. Last year, Berkeley did a one-day Ruby on Rails course and put the videos online.
EDIT: You mentioned getting your questions answered quickly. I'm constantly amazed at the number of smart and responsive people in IRC channels. You might want to give that a shot.
