Instine - Slashdot User

A Grand Day Out for British Rocketman-> 0

Submitted by

Instine

on Tuesday July 01 2008, @06:38AM

Instine writes "Salford University, in the UK, is showing an article suggesting that Britain's biggest ever rocket has been unveiled, by an academic planning a space tourism offering by 2013.
"Nova 2 qualifies as the biggest rocket ever created and flown from the UK mainland.", sais Steve Bennett, Head of Salford's Space Technology Laboratory

The current offering is said to amount to 20 minutes 'flight' and 3-4 mins floating. I'm not sure how much, but I'd pay for that."
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Tagging Pratchett-> 0

Submitted by

Instine

on Thursday December 27 2007, @07:27AM

Instine writes "Alzheimer's patients are to be electronically tagged, if the UK government and the foremost charity in the field have their way, says the BBC:
"The government has said tagging could allow people to lead "fuller lives".

Science Minister Malcolm Wicks said sufferers would gain the freedom to "roam around their communities" without their families suffering the anxiety that such wandering can currently cause. " While the Alzheimer's Society suggest it is for the sake of the sufferers' safety, and the article states that "The Alzheimer's Society said decisions about whether to use a tracking device should be made in conjunction with the person with the disease in the earlier stages of dementia." many on Slashdot, and elsewhere will undoubtedly have their reservations...

I wonder how Terry Pratchett feels about the possibility of being tagged?"
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UK retailers back talking internet

Submitted by

Instine

on Friday January 19 2007, @05:13PM

Instine writes "a Reuters article talks of a new text to speech service, which adds dynamic text to speech functionality to web pages, thereby helping users with reading difficulties. The CEO of IMRG, James Roper, is keen to push the business sence of catering to the approx. 20% of potential online customers who would benefit from a little help reading.

He's not alone. I can confirm that the biggest retailer in the UK, Tesco, has also backed it and will be piloting the system shortly, makeing wide-spread adoption throughout the online retail sector much more likely.

I'm the lead developer (and regular Slashdotter) of the project, so if you have any questions... Mine are: Would you like to see (hear) a talkling web (baring in mind you can always mute it)? And what would you like to see happen next with text to speech?"

YouTube your BigBrother?

Submitted by

Instine

on Friday October 27 2006, @10:29AM

Instine writes "The Times and many others are reporting a resent case of an individual being arrested after their (alleged) offence was caught of camera and posted to YouTube. While this is a boon for the guy who got his specs swiped, does this mean that the (average Joe in the street with camera) + (YouTube) = BigBrother CCTV?"

AJAX helping accessibility?

Submitted by Instine on Tuesday September 12 2006, @07:20PM

Instine writes "UK Company, Textic ltd have recently released a product that could help put to rest one of the most stubbornly dogmatised arguments against the use of AJAX, that AJAX could be the death of any hopes for an accessible web (or words to that effect). Their offering, Talklets, actually uses AJAX techniques to offer 'installation free' screen reading functionality to Web users.

Although they're still developing a version for users with no useful sight, the release currently available could afford someone with "little to no reading skills, dyslexia, moderate visual impairments or a number of other comparable reading impairments, such as Irlen syndrome" access to content on the vast majority of the Web's sites. A clever use of Bookmarklets also means that users can "load" the web-based text to speech service from most browsers they're likely to come across in a day, without needing administrator privileges, or downloading and running exe files. This actually offers a new level of freedom to those users, thought to make up more than 10-20% of the population."