They already do something like that in Japan; there are seven classes in each grade at the school where I teach, where each class has a certain educational focus. Class 1 is for the academically inclined (college-bound), class 2 is for those interested in international studies, class 3 for those interested in nursing, etc. The upper numbers (classes 6 and 7) are for those students still undecided.
Placement is based on a personal interview with each student, which takes placed at the end of the first year of high school. The conversation basically consists of asking him or her, "What do you want to do?" It's completely up to the student to make the decision.
Yes, it is possible, but highly improbable.:) As a matter-of-fact, you'd have to be pretty industrious either way to get them back out the same day. And this is assuming you don't have a job to worry about.
It would depend on the model of your printer as well, wouldn't it? If you have a printer from a couple of years ago and this is a recent development, then no, you wouldn't be affected.
Actually, I'm currently working as a teacher, and we're the first to tell you the education system sucks.
As for movies, I'm producing an independent film with two partners, one of whom is the script writer, and getting him to change one iota of his script has been teeth-grindingly painful. However, he writes a good story, and there's only been one obvious place that we absolutely had to change it.
Whether or not a screenplay gets changed is largely dependent on the studio, the director, and the writer. It's not a given. Some of them pride themselves on how rigid and uncompromising they can be.
A run of just 1,000 DVDs will run you $2 a copy, complete with packaging.
You make the stores buy the DVDs for you at $12 a copy and suggest they sell it for $15 a copy. You deliver the DVDs to only a few major distribution centers (a la Hastings, Amazon, etc.), let those companies worry about the rest of the distribution costs, and save a bundle on shipping.
Smaller outfits (not belonging to a franchised retail chain) pay an additional "non-preferred member" S&H fee, thus eliminating paying extra for mom-and-pop businesses. If they want to avoid paying the shipping costs, they can enter into a "preferred member distribution agreement," which states that for a flat annual fee, they can purchase as many DVDs as they think they can sell with no shipping costs. Some will buy more, some will by less; in the average, the distribution agreement contract allows you to still at least keep S&H at a bare minimum, if not allowing you to make a net profit. (If it doesn't make money, hire better accountants.)
Direct distribution (sales by catalog or internet) is even more lucrative, as you make the customer pay all shipping costs. You can even sell it for the suggested retail price of $15, leaving you with a tidy $13 of revenue on each DVD.
Although this is all off the top of my head, I would not be surprised if this isn't exactly what's really going on. Can you even conceive of only half of $27.5 billion in sales? That's not even counting merchandising and theater ticket sales. I hardly think they're hurting. You don't hear Ferrari complaining that movie piracy is cutting into their sales, do you?
No offense, but anyone who can't figure out how to use and become familar enough with the visual studio IDE to use it in a teaching environment shouldn't be called a guru of anything. It's extremely simple to use until you want to start doing very complex things.
Being able to jump from one software package to another isn't always easy, even if the new one is supposedly better. I just recently change video compositing packages to a better one and expect to take a few months of constant use (or more) before I'm as fluent in it as I was in the previous software, which I've been using for seven years. The workflow is different, the terminology is different; it's a lot like learning a new programming language.
You get comfortable with your tools, it's going to take you a while to get used to new ones. It has nothing to do with your ability as a programmer.
FYI: iDVD is an app for creating and mastering your own DVDs, not playing them back (you're thinking of DVD player.) Xine/mplayer/ogle are nothing like it.
Actually, it's because the credit card companies double-dip; they charge you for using the credit card, and they charge the business for running it through. The businesses have decided to just pass the cost on to the customers. Don't feel bad; it's been this way for a long time in the rest of the world, because businesses outside of America thought it was a bunch of crap from the get-go.
As for the cable companies? Yeah, they're pretty much just screwing you.:)
OS X will run X11 desktop environments natively, so you only have to hit a key combination to go from a full-screen X11 environment back to OS X. You could also run Windows on Virtual PC and complain about how incredibly slow it is.;)
Actually, if you live in the United States and can read German, then technically it fulfills your requirements. As it is, I'm an American in Japan and I can read it just fine. Maybe it's just a question of geography?;) (Doesn't hurt to speak German, though.)
How could using a "preloaded video clip inserted into a live video stream in real time" be used for incriminating someone? It would require the cooperation of all the individuals involved in order to make it work seamlessly, and even then it would be highly improbable that anyone would take it for the genuine article. You would have to match light direction, camera type (including lens, focus, film vs. tape, etc.) and then synchronize the action and dialogue in both shots.
Why do you think the best Hollywood special effects houses labor for months over this kind of thing? If it was that easy to do, studios wouldn't be making the millions they are. Even then, after throwing away thousands of dollars on the latest, state-of-the-art hardware and software, how many times have you been able to point at an actor and say, "yeah, I can tell he was green-screened." Even assuming the artist managed to make a shot so seamless that the human eye could be fooled, it would be much harder to fool a computer with some basic image analysis software.
Even if the government knew who you were and gave a damn about the fact, it is still far outside the realm of feasibility to do such a thing. It'd be far easier to just forge some official documents in order to incriminate someone, just like the good old days. Or they could label you as having associations with terrorists and hold you indefinitely without charge. Video not required.
"More than a million?" More like 90% of the adult population (Japan has the highest number of cell phones per capita in the world.) Also, the reason why people in Japan use SMS and email on their cell phones isn't because of concerns about rudeness, but simply to avoid the expensive call times (we don't get free nights and weekends here, or free anything else, for that matter.)
I haven't noticed any thumb degredation from using my cell phone, although I do prefer typing in Japanese rather than English because it's faster (you type in syllables rather than letters, the language is less wordy in its casual form, and type-ahead is a wonderful thing.) I think this is just another research study intended to justify somebody's job at a university. Otherwise, they might have to start teaching to earn their keep, and then where would we be?;)
It uses a whitelist as a means of solving spam. The system claims to allow strangers to effectively email each other, but only after first forcing the user to jump through several hoops. Correspondence will be slowed, and many people may give up in irritation before they bother to send the mail a second time. Imagine a prospective employer who decides that it's not worth tracking down Joe Blow because the email didn't get through, or a university attempting to contact a student by email. This particular method of foiling spam eliminates one of the key benefits of email: easy correspondence with a fast response time.
Users have to maintain a database of trusted senders, as well as another database of recipients who trust them. This means extra data and the possibility of users accidentally falling off of each other's whitelists whenever somebody loses their address book.
It will generate too many bounced messages, thus increasing network overhead to a point where it really may not be much better than spam. It also requires transmission of graphics, which again increase system overhead, as well as extra computational time to generate said images and to register and process the responses.
The system claims it will benefit from server-side cooperation, instead of keeping the method purely client-side. This means that users have to rely on the benevolence of their ISP to keep the system updated and maintained.
The graphical images contain a fixed number of very easily discerned letters that can be combined to form "easily-remembered" words. Once the letters are extracted, they can be recombined into known sequences, first of common English words, then popular web slang, then even transcribed into 1337 for the heck of it. Shouldn't take long to hack that.
Sub-addresses? So you want to explain this one to my parents? "I know you picked out one, simple email address that you really like and will never have to change, but now I want you to pick out a new one. It might be a good idea to change it once every few months or so, too." The whole purpose of an address is to allow someone to have a unique identity that can be easily found.
Honestly, this particular system sounds like it relies more on sheer grunt work and the wasted time of its users to make it work, rather than any innovative computer programming.
That's very odd. Everything I was ever taught about Celsius and Kelvin showed that they both used the same magnitude but had different starting points (0 degrees Celsius is 273.15 degrees Kelvin.) If addition and subtraction in Celsius is impossible, how on earth does my thermometer work? Might want to check your facts again.
I was reassured to see that the original article also refers to the temperature changes in degrees C, not degrees K.
You know, if I were this guy, I would have been calling them once every five minutes saying, "Hey, did you remember to get my experiment going?" If it's really that important, why let someone else screw it up for you? It's your baby, your responsibility.
I've been living in Osaka, Japan for the last three years and I have to say that even among Japan's most outgoing people (the Osakans), the Japanese are not as outgoing as you seem to think. The grandparent was a lot more accurate, based on his books, than you, based on your personal experience. I would tend to believe what I read from research first, rather than one person's personal experience, anyway; a weekend trip to Tokyo doesn't count. Remember: every person's experience is different. Here's a little bit of mine:
The Japanese are as often hamstrung by social structure as books will lead you to believe. A "good" Japanese person worries about not putting themselves forward too much; they also are very conscious of seniority and groups. This largely defines how they interact with people.
It's really hard for a Japanese guy to meet a girl, based on several things: one, they're incredibly shy. As a high school teacher, I have been surprised to find that sometimes the boys don't even know the girls' names, even though they sit in the same room for several years. Getting them to even acknowledge the presence of a particular member of the opposite sex may be misconstrued as voicing one's personal interest, which is a definite no-no. The idea of using a pager that automatically identifies people of similar interests sounds very Tokyo-ish, and probably a very small, niche market. Most likely, it is used by school girls to identify other school girls, because guys wouldn't even dream of getting involved.
For a Japanese, the idea of rejection means that they will have exposed their inner feelings, potentially to everyone, which is the ultimate embarrassment for them. Japanese prefer to let things develop over a long period of time, which is why the whole sempai/kohai (senior/junior) relationship is often romanticized.
Japanese can seem very warm and friendly to foreigners especially, because they believe that we're not hampered by Japanese restraints, as we're not Japanese. However, by that same token, they are less likely to take us seriously, because, well, we're not Japanese. They can be very generous and gracious hosts, but unless you make a serious effort to integrate yourself into the culture and the language, you'll find yourself just as lonely as the rest of them.
On gadgets: at least in my area, while there are many gadgets to be had, the Japanese are pretty reasonable on the whole thing. They prefer sensible to gaudy, and would rather not waste their money on features they don't need. One of my friends just got his Docomo cell phone replaced, and he always tells them to give him whatever's cheapest at the time (he's regretting that policy right now as it got him a 505i, which was the latest and greatest of last year; the design is pretty much crap.)
Finally, most Westerners make the mistake of judging Japan based on what they know of Tokyo. That's a lot like judging America based on, say, New York, or Germany based on Munich. For natives of those countries, they know that this is a gross misrepresentation of their culture, as such large cities often have unique micro-cultures of their own. Tokyo is very un-Japanese in many ways. It is a giant shopping district, attempting to be everything to everyone, and failing completely to have a personality of its own. But then, I prefer Osaka.
I found the article to be typical of the genre; very narrow scope that continues to feed the Western stereotypes of Japanese. My findings? There are only a few things that Japan has that are better than what you get in America; otherwise, we're pretty much on par. America is, after all, Japan's biggest market; it's in their best interest to continue to offer the latest tech.
Yeah, you can find weird novelty items for sale, but that doesn't mean people are buying it. Were Japanese to base their conceptions of America on what you can find in stores in Los Angeles, they'd be convinced that the creature comforts available in America are more elaborate, st
Why don't we users do the same and respect the people who pay to run the site? The sites agree to give us relevant ads that we might actually be interested in, and we in turn accept that as a user of their site, we accept that they run ads. You can't have it both ways; either you pay for the content, or somebody else does. Not expecting to pay for something valuable is called mooching, and it's incredibly tacky, in the real world or otherwise.
China's ulterior motive is to make us a huge part of the world economy and then pull the stops, thus causing a global economic collapse that hurts China as much as everybody else?
Devious, those Chinese. Even now that I know what they're up to, I don't understand. Truly, they are virtuosos of economic manipulation.
Yet it could also be said that no-talents will produce talentless work regardless of the technology at their disposal. Providing them with digital tools merely allows them to produce crap in newer, more spectacular ways. Just because someone went to film school doesn't mean they're any good at it, it just means they could afford it and got passing grades.
Actually, that's the default style of code that Docomo phones usually use - I first played with it at McDonald's, when I saw one printed on the tray insert (the paper they stick on top of the tray.) I didn't even have to get close or anything; once the phone was in bar code reader mode, it found it and scanned it automatically.
The cameras in Japanese cell phones are usually above 1 Megapixel, so more than enough resolution to resolve bar codes.
All you have to do here is increase the font size and the error is immediately apparent. Text links overlapping standard text and text bleeding over into other areas are two problems that come to mind right off the bat.
If you count the fact that Stitch was evil and had to learn to stand up to himself, then yeah, pretty much the same story that every movie has ever told.
If you want to over-simplify it that much, then it could be said that "The Incredibles" is a story of a character who must look deep within himself to find that special thing that allows him to stand up to evil/father-figure/society and become a hero.
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They already do something like that in Japan; there are seven classes in each grade at the school where I teach, where each class has a certain educational focus. Class 1 is for the academically inclined (college-bound), class 2 is for those interested in international studies, class 3 for those interested in nursing, etc. The upper numbers (classes 6 and 7) are for those students still undecided.
Placement is based on a personal interview with each student, which takes placed at the end of the first year of high school. The conversation basically consists of asking him or her, "What do you want to do?" It's completely up to the student to make the decision.
Yes, it is possible, but highly improbable. :) As a matter-of-fact, you'd have to be pretty industrious either way to get them back out the same day. And this is assuming you don't have a job to worry about.
It would depend on the model of your printer as well, wouldn't it? If you have a printer from a couple of years ago and this is a recent development, then no, you wouldn't be affected.
Actually, I'm currently working as a teacher, and we're the first to tell you the education system sucks.
As for movies, I'm producing an independent film with two partners, one of whom is the script writer, and getting him to change one iota of his script has been teeth-grindingly painful. However, he writes a good story, and there's only been one obvious place that we absolutely had to change it.
Whether or not a screenplay gets changed is largely dependent on the studio, the director, and the writer. It's not a given. Some of them pride themselves on how rigid and uncompromising they can be.
Here's the businesss model:
A run of just 1,000 DVDs will run you $2 a copy, complete with packaging.
You make the stores buy the DVDs for you at $12 a copy and suggest they sell it for $15 a copy. You deliver the DVDs to only a few major distribution centers (a la Hastings, Amazon, etc.), let those companies worry about the rest of the distribution costs, and save a bundle on shipping.
Smaller outfits (not belonging to a franchised retail chain) pay an additional "non-preferred member" S&H fee, thus eliminating paying extra for mom-and-pop businesses. If they want to avoid paying the shipping costs, they can enter into a "preferred member distribution agreement," which states that for a flat annual fee, they can purchase as many DVDs as they think they can sell with no shipping costs. Some will buy more, some will by less; in the average, the distribution agreement contract allows you to still at least keep S&H at a bare minimum, if not allowing you to make a net profit. (If it doesn't make money, hire better accountants.)
Direct distribution (sales by catalog or internet) is even more lucrative, as you make the customer pay all shipping costs. You can even sell it for the suggested retail price of $15, leaving you with a tidy $13 of revenue on each DVD.
Although this is all off the top of my head, I would not be surprised if this isn't exactly what's really going on. Can you even conceive of only half of $27.5 billion in sales? That's not even counting merchandising and theater ticket sales. I hardly think they're hurting. You don't hear Ferrari complaining that movie piracy is cutting into their sales, do you?
Vodafone already offered a 1GB MP3 model two years ago in Japan, and it was reasonably priced.
No offense, but anyone who can't figure out how to use and become familar enough with the visual studio IDE to use it in a teaching environment shouldn't be called a guru of anything. It's extremely simple to use until you want to start doing very complex things.
Being able to jump from one software package to another isn't always easy, even if the new one is supposedly better. I just recently change video compositing packages to a better one and expect to take a few months of constant use (or more) before I'm as fluent in it as I was in the previous software, which I've been using for seven years. The workflow is different, the terminology is different; it's a lot like learning a new programming language.
You get comfortable with your tools, it's going to take you a while to get used to new ones. It has nothing to do with your ability as a programmer.
FYI: iDVD is an app for creating and mastering your own DVDs, not playing them back (you're thinking of DVD player.) Xine/mplayer/ogle are nothing like it.
Actually, it's because the credit card companies double-dip; they charge you for using the credit card, and they charge the business for running it through. The businesses have decided to just pass the cost on to the customers. Don't feel bad; it's been this way for a long time in the rest of the world, because businesses outside of America thought it was a bunch of crap from the get-go.
:)
As for the cable companies? Yeah, they're pretty much just screwing you.
OS X will run X11 desktop environments natively, so you only have to hit a key combination to go from a full-screen X11 environment back to OS X. You could also run Windows on Virtual PC and complain about how incredibly slow it is. ;)
Actually, if you live in the United States and can read German, then technically it fulfills your requirements. As it is, I'm an American in Japan and I can read it just fine. Maybe it's just a question of geography? ;) (Doesn't hurt to speak German, though.)
How could using a "preloaded video clip inserted into a live video stream in real time" be used for incriminating someone? It would require the cooperation of all the individuals involved in order to make it work seamlessly, and even then it would be highly improbable that anyone would take it for the genuine article. You would have to match light direction, camera type (including lens, focus, film vs. tape, etc.) and then synchronize the action and dialogue in both shots.
Why do you think the best Hollywood special effects houses labor for months over this kind of thing? If it was that easy to do, studios wouldn't be making the millions they are. Even then, after throwing away thousands of dollars on the latest, state-of-the-art hardware and software, how many times have you been able to point at an actor and say, "yeah, I can tell he was green-screened." Even assuming the artist managed to make a shot so seamless that the human eye could be fooled, it would be much harder to fool a computer with some basic image analysis software.
Even if the government knew who you were and gave a damn about the fact, it is still far outside the realm of feasibility to do such a thing. It'd be far easier to just forge some official documents in order to incriminate someone, just like the good old days. Or they could label you as having associations with terrorists and hold you indefinitely without charge. Video not required.
"More than a million?" More like 90% of the adult population (Japan has the highest number of cell phones per capita in the world.) Also, the reason why people in Japan use SMS and email on their cell phones isn't because of concerns about rudeness, but simply to avoid the expensive call times (we don't get free nights and weekends here, or free anything else, for that matter.)
;)
I haven't noticed any thumb degredation from using my cell phone, although I do prefer typing in Japanese rather than English because it's faster (you type in syllables rather than letters, the language is less wordy in its casual form, and type-ahead is a wonderful thing.) I think this is just another research study intended to justify somebody's job at a university. Otherwise, they might have to start teaching to earn their keep, and then where would we be?
- It uses a whitelist as a means of solving spam. The system claims to allow strangers to effectively email each other, but only after first forcing the user to jump through several hoops. Correspondence will be slowed, and many people may give up in irritation before they bother to send the mail a second time. Imagine a prospective employer who decides that it's not worth tracking down Joe Blow because the email didn't get through, or a university attempting to contact a student by email. This particular method of foiling spam eliminates one of the key benefits of email: easy correspondence with a fast response time.
- Users have to maintain a database of trusted senders, as well as another database of recipients who trust them. This means extra data and the possibility of users accidentally falling off of each other's whitelists whenever somebody loses their address book.
- It will generate too many bounced messages, thus increasing network overhead to a point where it really may not be much better than spam. It also requires transmission of graphics, which again increase system overhead, as well as extra computational time to generate said images and to register and process the responses.
- The system claims it will benefit from server-side cooperation, instead of keeping the method purely client-side. This means that users have to rely on the benevolence of their ISP to keep the system updated and maintained.
- The graphical images contain a fixed number of very easily discerned letters that can be combined to form "easily-remembered" words. Once the letters are extracted, they can be recombined into known sequences, first of common English words, then popular web slang, then even transcribed into 1337 for the heck of it. Shouldn't take long to hack that.
- Sub-addresses? So you want to explain this one to my parents? "I know you picked out one, simple email address that you really like and will never have to change, but now I want you to pick out a new one. It might be a good idea to change it once every few months or so, too." The whole purpose of an address is to allow someone to have a unique identity that can be easily found.
Honestly, this particular system sounds like it relies more on sheer grunt work and the wasted time of its users to make it work, rather than any innovative computer programming.That's very odd. Everything I was ever taught about Celsius and Kelvin showed that they both used the same magnitude but had different starting points (0 degrees Celsius is 273.15 degrees Kelvin.) If addition and subtraction in Celsius is impossible, how on earth does my thermometer work? Might want to check your facts again.
I was reassured to see that the original article also refers to the temperature changes in degrees C, not degrees K.
You know, if I were this guy, I would have been calling them once every five minutes saying, "Hey, did you remember to get my experiment going?" If it's really that important, why let someone else screw it up for you? It's your baby, your responsibility.
In which case he pays a flat 10%, according to the Japanese system.
I've been living in Osaka, Japan for the last three years and I have to say that even among Japan's most outgoing people (the Osakans), the Japanese are not as outgoing as you seem to think. The grandparent was a lot more accurate, based on his books, than you, based on your personal experience. I would tend to believe what I read from research first, rather than one person's personal experience, anyway; a weekend trip to Tokyo doesn't count. Remember: every person's experience is different. Here's a little bit of mine:
The Japanese are as often hamstrung by social structure as books will lead you to believe. A "good" Japanese person worries about not putting themselves forward too much; they also are very conscious of seniority and groups. This largely defines how they interact with people.
It's really hard for a Japanese guy to meet a girl, based on several things: one, they're incredibly shy. As a high school teacher, I have been surprised to find that sometimes the boys don't even know the girls' names, even though they sit in the same room for several years. Getting them to even acknowledge the presence of a particular member of the opposite sex may be misconstrued as voicing one's personal interest, which is a definite no-no. The idea of using a pager that automatically identifies people of similar interests sounds very Tokyo-ish, and probably a very small, niche market. Most likely, it is used by school girls to identify other school girls, because guys wouldn't even dream of getting involved.
For a Japanese, the idea of rejection means that they will have exposed their inner feelings, potentially to everyone, which is the ultimate embarrassment for them. Japanese prefer to let things develop over a long period of time, which is why the whole sempai/kohai (senior/junior) relationship is often romanticized.
Japanese can seem very warm and friendly to foreigners especially, because they believe that we're not hampered by Japanese restraints, as we're not Japanese. However, by that same token, they are less likely to take us seriously, because, well, we're not Japanese. They can be very generous and gracious hosts, but unless you make a serious effort to integrate yourself into the culture and the language, you'll find yourself just as lonely as the rest of them.
On gadgets: at least in my area, while there are many gadgets to be had, the Japanese are pretty reasonable on the whole thing. They prefer sensible to gaudy, and would rather not waste their money on features they don't need. One of my friends just got his Docomo cell phone replaced, and he always tells them to give him whatever's cheapest at the time (he's regretting that policy right now as it got him a 505i, which was the latest and greatest of last year; the design is pretty much crap.)
Finally, most Westerners make the mistake of judging Japan based on what they know of Tokyo. That's a lot like judging America based on, say, New York, or Germany based on Munich. For natives of those countries, they know that this is a gross misrepresentation of their culture, as such large cities often have unique micro-cultures of their own. Tokyo is very un-Japanese in many ways. It is a giant shopping district, attempting to be everything to everyone, and failing completely to have a personality of its own. But then, I prefer Osaka.
I found the article to be typical of the genre; very narrow scope that continues to feed the Western stereotypes of Japanese. My findings? There are only a few things that Japan has that are better than what you get in America; otherwise, we're pretty much on par. America is, after all, Japan's biggest market; it's in their best interest to continue to offer the latest tech.
Yeah, you can find weird novelty items for sale, but that doesn't mean people are buying it. Were Japanese to base their conceptions of America on what you can find in stores in Los Angeles, they'd be convinced that the creature comforts available in America are more elaborate, st
Why don't we users do the same and respect the people who pay to run the site? The sites agree to give us relevant ads that we might actually be interested in, and we in turn accept that as a user of their site, we accept that they run ads. You can't have it both ways; either you pay for the content, or somebody else does. Not expecting to pay for something valuable is called mooching, and it's incredibly tacky, in the real world or otherwise.
China's ulterior motive is to make us a huge part of the world economy and then pull the stops, thus causing a global economic collapse that hurts China as much as everybody else?
Devious, those Chinese. Even now that I know what they're up to, I don't understand. Truly, they are virtuosos of economic manipulation.
Yet it could also be said that no-talents will produce talentless work regardless of the technology at their disposal. Providing them with digital tools merely allows them to produce crap in newer, more spectacular ways. Just because someone went to film school doesn't mean they're any good at it, it just means they could afford it and got passing grades.
Actually, that's the default style of code that Docomo phones usually use - I first played with it at McDonald's, when I saw one printed on the tray insert (the paper they stick on top of the tray.) I didn't even have to get close or anything; once the phone was in bar code reader mode, it found it and scanned it automatically.
The cameras in Japanese cell phones are usually above 1 Megapixel, so more than enough resolution to resolve bar codes.
Perhaps it's related to OSX. Firefox is still not as polished here as it is under Windows.
All you have to do here is increase the font size and the error is immediately apparent. Text links overlapping standard text and text bleeding over into other areas are two problems that come to mind right off the bat.
If you count the fact that Stitch was evil and had to learn to stand up to himself, then yeah, pretty much the same story that every movie has ever told.
If you want to over-simplify it that much, then it could be said that "The Incredibles" is a story of a character who must look deep within himself to find that special thing that allows him to stand up to evil/father-figure/society and become a hero.