Install an IR LED on the baton. Google "LED throwies" for what you need. Most IR LEDs have a fairly narrow beam so sand down the lens to scatter the light more.

Then get some IR cameras to track them. Any cheap webcam will do. Add an IR filter by having an UNUSED roll of film developed. Install one camera watching from your position, and possibly one to the side, above, or under the conductor if Z-motion is important.

Then get some motion tracking software like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeTrack

Now you have a signal. Use that to drive any output device you want. Three cell phone vibrators for X, Y and Z might work. Audio might work - try making a tone that changes in pitch with the derivative of the baton's velocity. You should get little chirps when the conductor makes sharp motions. Some blind folks can still sense light - they have basically one pixel per eye. It might be possible to give them glasses with LEDs mounted so they can see flashes.

I don't bother sorting or categorizing or anything. I just have procmail send a copy to an archive file which I rotate once a year, and I index it all with mairix: http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ . I can search on date, sender, subject, body, etc, and in a few seconds I have what I need.

You're mixed up about octane ratings. Pure ethanol is about 100 octane (AKI). The "85" is E85, which means 85% ethanol.

It certainly shouldn't be run in engines which weren't designed for it, but it is not "so corrosive ... it's internals melt out". The fuel system gaskets will harden and crack. That's expensive, but come on. There are plenty of good reasons why we shouldn't use ethanol. You don't have to spew alarmist FUD.

Reflogs aren't for history; they're just a convenient undo stack for your own use. Examining project history is pretty similar to most other VCSes. Give it a try:

git clone https://github.com/jquery/jquery.git
cd jquery
git log --stat # answers most of the questions you asked above
git show-branch -a # makes sense of merges
git show 6a82f2a # Shows everything that went into a specific commit
git checkout 6a82f2a # Check out that commit so you can explore the tree
gitk # Start GUI history explorer tool

Hashes are globally unique so if you 'git checkout 6a82f2ae63263ed9deaff9d9dcc775a2c0cde343', you are guaranteed to have the exact same tree as I do; and no matter how many weird rebases you've done, 'git log --oneline --shortstat 6a82f2ae63263ed9deaff9d9dcc775a2c0cde343 -n 5' will show the same history as I have:

In my opinion git provides better history guarantees than most other VCSes. Everything in a branch's history is completely set in stone by the sha1 sum of that commit. You can rebase your own local work, but once it's pushed to somewhere other people will see your changes, they're nearly permanent - pushing a rebase forces everyone else to rebase onto your new tree; it is not done lightly, and it is not the kind of thing that results in the history of who did what when getting lost without being noticed.

Compare that to Perforce - you can 'p4 obliterate' a file, and its whole history is gone without a trace. Same deal with svn - they don't give you sharp tools, but you can still dump the repo, edit the dump to make some changes, and load it back up. The history disappears completely.

Rebase makes it easier to DO these things, but the sha1 sums guarantee that you can't change history without being noticed. That's a stronger guarantee than most of the centralized systems.

(Note that Mercurial sha1 tracking as well and thus has similar history guarantees; my comments on history integrity aren't a criticism of hg.)

You can have it today. Navfree or Osmand if you want the free route; Sygic has a paid app; I'm sure there are others.

Of course you'll lose out on all the things that make Google maps nifty: good search, traffic, rich POI data, etc, but the basic functionality works fine offline.

What does the government have to do with it? I'm under the impression that this is people freely choosing to undergo the procedure to free themselves of their addictions.

I'd rather not shout it to the whole world. I frequently talk on mailing lists and forums where I expect there to only be a dozen or a hundred people reading it. Unfortunately the internet never forgets, and if I sign my real name to it, it becomes my legacy. I prefer to not have to think whether every random comment is well-considered and sensible. I just want to share an idea, not make a statement for all posterity.

As for Internet Fuckwards... Well, maybe people will say dumb shit because they're anonymous, but posting anonymously also protects YOU from being harassed by those fuckwads too. Let's say one day you post "Hey, Hitler wasn't entirely bad. He did a good thing with the autobahn!". Without anonymity, you now have some asshole - who may not mind posting under their real name since he's just protecting the world from you - following you for a few years in every forum calling you a nazi sympathizer and linking that quote. Posting anonymously you just make your little point and move on, internet fuckwads averted.

And I'm just some random geek talking about vaguely controversial things. There are far more critical cases like bullying victims who need a place to talk without attracting MORE bullying, or rape victims, or people who just need to talk about their dark fantasies or fucked up dreams. Anonymity protects you - it limits the damage to whatever nasty words someone can send back to your anonymous account. I would rather deal with those assholes than be physically hurt, stalked, and harassed.

Then would you mind telling us your full name?

Youtube pulled it, but LiveLeak has the goods: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=16d_1356820592

Note that scrap mild steel is almost an order of magnitude weaker than hardened armor plate. Steel plates thinner than that (half) in a ballistic vest can reliably stop bullets going faster than that (7.62x51 has a lot more punch than 7.62x39).

Disagree. Medians (the 50th percentile) are usually the best metric. Averages are good when you're interested in how something performs in aggregate (eg, average MPG your car if you want to estimate how much money you'll spend on gas driving cross-country), but you usually want the median when you're interested in a quick snapshot of what your typical person experiences. It's usually a better metric, and it's just as easy to understand on a comparison chart like this.

As a similar compromise, I use Mutt + RoundCube. 99% of my mail is fine in Mutt, and the webmail UI makes it easy to handle attachments when I need them.

LastPass. Separate, strong passwords for every site; one YubiKey for the master login if you want it. KeePass is good too; store part of your key on a dongle for extra security.

If it's a minor tweak that everyone was using then there's prior art and you don't have a valid patent. If it's a tweak that no one else thought of that suddenly makes an old impractical idea become a realistic and useful thing, well, that sounds like a pretty legit patent to me.

Why place a lower bound on the degree of novelty? If you patent a minor tweak that no one needs then everyone will just ignore your method and use the original one - which your patent doesn't cover.