How dry does a rock/metal vocal have to be during recording?

Question: Is dryer (= less room ambience including room modes and short first reflection times) always better for the final mixing result, or is there a threshold below which it simply doesn't matter, and the optimization of other dimensions, such as tonal balance, transients, harmonic purity and tonal consistency becomes more important? How do you find the best compromise between signal dryness and how good it sounds raw, without being able to hear the final result in a professional mix?
Comment: This depends a bit on your setup and equipment, but you don't necessarily have to choose between the two. Usually you can record a completely dry (or as dry as the room allows) signal while applying a little reverb to the singer's monitor feed. This way you have better control of the mix, but the sound is a bit more natural for the singer, and this encourages them to sing more confidently.
Comment: It's an artistic and production choice. The worse the recording environment is, the more there is to be gained by having less of that environment in the microphone (which means a dryer recording). If the room the vocalist is in sounds great, then you can have a very wet recording that still works. In other words, there won't be a clear answer that is objectively correct for all situations.
Comment: My limited experience suggests that while dry vocals may be great for the sound engineer, they're awful for the singer.
Comment: @It's HEDLEY This is a good point, and is generally why I record the actual track dry (except for maybe a bit of compression), but the vocalist gets a processed track in their in-ears with the full compression, reverb, delay, or whatever else goes on the vocal track.
Comment: Garbage in, garbage out.
Comment: OP says : "The thing is, "as dry as I can" would mean I put the microphone with the obligatory pop filter uncomfortably close to the mouth, producing an imbalanced, inconsistent, muddy sound with popping noises. If I choose a distance of 12 cm, although technically the sound is not as dry, it still sounds very dry and upfront, while sounding much better overall, but going just slightly further back creates a more crisp, balanced sound, while the effect of the room is very minor still. So the question for me is, how much dryness is worth the cost." – Fid Rewe
Answer: "Completely dry" gives the sound engineer complete freedom to supplant any amount of reverberant room acoustics without causing any inconsistencies, allowing free location of all musicians in a virtual room.
So it's the best material to be working with.  That doesn't mean that it's an absolute prerequisite for the results to turn out good.  But the fewer tracks require special care, the more likely the sound engineer has freedom to focus on producing quality.
Comment: With great freedom comes great responsibility. In other words, a completely dry recording might be much harder to make sound good and fit the mix than one that has some high-quality ambiance. I'm not sure if this was your intention to imply that dryer is always better. If that's your answer then I disagree.
Comment: ""Completely dry" gives the sound engineer complete freedom to supplant any amount of reverberant room acoustics without causing any inconsistencies, allowing free location of all musicians in a virtual room."

Makes sense, but if the room ambience is like 5% of what you would hear in a typical mix, is that more problematic (if at all) than a noticable loss of texture and increase in muddiness, which cannot be fixed via EQ?
Answer: In addition to what user90207 said, dry vocals play nicely with several common effects:
Pitch-correction software may have difficulty tracking pitch on very wet vocals, or more commonly the reverb tails just sound unnatural when a note is corrected.
If there is reverb in the recording, it will be affected by compression in a way that may not be desired.  A dry vocal lets you do all of your compression and then add reverb later.  If you took the amount of compression used in modern metal recordings and put that on a nice ambient recording, you'd get an explosion of reverb after each line.
Distortion also has a compressing effect.  Putting a wet vocal through distortion gives a noisy track.
There is also the possibility that reverb tails in a wet vocal cause difficulty when editing takes together ("comping").
These are all standard processes in modern recording, so studios tend to record vocals very dry.
Now, to directly answer the question- It largely depends on how heavily you will use the above effects.  I've had good results close miking in a mostly untreated but dead room (rug, soft-ish ceiling tiles, big bookshelves, I hung one blanket off a mic stand by the singer).  In the mix, it sounds fine, even after heavy compression and pitch correction.  If the vocal is especially exposed for a bit, you could just do more takes and less pitch correction.  But really, my "noise floor" (measured between two syllables on the words "we could") is about -45dB, and most of that is the direct sound of me at the mic.  That's plenty dry enough.  Close miking does a lot for rejecting room noise.
I'm not sure what you mean by "tonal balance, transients, harmonic purity and tonal consistency".  Transients can be adjusted with compression or transient shaping plugins, and everything else can only be made worse with room reflections.
Comment: Thanks for this very interesting reply.
The room accoustics is pretty good according to REW. I've used thick high quality absorbing material behind the mic and at the first reflection points. However, this doesn't have much effect below ~300 Hz. The microphone is the Sphere L22, which has a freely tunable pickup pattern, as well as a superior customizable off-axis rejection, but going as tight as possible comes is at the cost of linear off-axis response. Also, close miking works down to a point, where several issues arise that just can't be fully corrected with EQ or compression.
Comment: The vocal doesn't sound reverbant at all and I don't notice a tail that could affect a compressor, let alone pitch correction, which I don't desire anyway, but in comparison to what I get when I push it, the effect of the room is still pretty noticable. When I push it, it sounds like a voice right in your face in complete silence, while the setup I would choose based on other deliberations sounds more natural, not reverbant, but I quess the decay tails are just a bit longer, which makes it sound more natural and slightly less close.
Comment: The threshold below which it simply doesn't matter is called the *noise floor*, +1. GL keeping it where it is; that's the holy grail of recording. **GIGO**.
Answer: I'd suggest keeping the vocal signal that you actually record as dry as you can, but put some nice effects on the vocal signal going to the singer's headphones as they perform.
That way they'll feel comfortable, but you'll have an unaffected vocal recording giving you the freedom to try other signal treatments.
It also makes punch in and comping easier because you don't have to worry about clipping reverb tails.
Comment: The thing is, "as dry as I can" would mean I put the microphone with the obligatory pop filter uncomfortably close to the mouth, producing an imbalanced, inconsistent, muddy sound with popping noises. If I choose a distance of 12 cm, although technically the sound is not as dry, it still sounds very dry and upfront, while sounding much better overall, but going just slightly further back creates a more crisp, balanced sound, while the effect of the room is very minor still. So the question for me is, how much dryness is worth the cost.
Comment: @FidRewe "popping noises" or clipping is the only thing worse than a dirty noise floor. You gotta do what you gotta do. "uncomfortably close to the mouth" : not my problem, deal with it. "imbalanced, inconsistent" : *stand still, laddy!*. "muddy sound" is either too close or their voice is real deep, and/or your mic is trash. .... Trading the Bluesmobile for a microphone wasn't a joke. Are you using a $2k condenser? If you had one of those you'd be asking how to *keep* room noise out of it, not let some in.
Comment: @Mazura your interpretation is wrong. It's about finding the optimal setup, not about fixing major issues. The sound quality is very solid. The terms I use are relative, describing differences. No matter how good the singer or the mic is, the sound quality will always depend on mic placement. My mic is all I could wish for, it has a tighter pickup pattern, lower proximity effect and more linear off-axis response than single capsule condensor mics could have. It also gives me possibilities classical mics don't offer. But as another commenter said, with great freedom comes great responsibility.


How to deal with dead characters' gear?

Question: A few of my PCs have died. It happens. But now what? Specifically, now what happens to their items? They are rolling up some new characters and I assume they should follow the character wealth guidelines for their current level, but what is stopping them from locating their corpses and effectively doubling their wealth just like that? How do you deal with dead characters' wealth?
Comment: One of our DMs at Uni had an alternative way of dealing with this - he said that gear, including starting money, was *per player* not per character. If your character died and the party still had the assets of the dead character, then those assets counted against what the new character had when they arrived. It sounds harsh but in practice worked really well, because we, as players, had the choice of the party keeping old items for losing them (in some story-related manner). ALso, having new characters come in almost broke made for some interesting stories.
Comment: One thing that needs to be considered is how the new PC's get introduced(or spawned in). If using a town/city that is centralized in the story then these answers work well. However if your group tends to wander and not return to a common place then the PC's would be spawned close enough to join the surviving party within the session. If that is the case Honorable Burial would be the way I would go(or some curse on the land that removes the dead and their possessions from the continuum).
Comment: @GreenstoneWalker: That should be an answer.
Answer: Do they have the corpses?
Do they already know where the corpses are? Do they have access to them? Are they already in someones possession?
If the party doesn't currently have the corpses but does know where they are... then it's easy: by time the new characters get to them, someone else has already looted the bodies.
If you think the party can actually get the items on the corpses, lower their starting wealth appropriately. Character wealth guidelines are guidelines, they can and should be altered as needed.
If you can't do that (because the players will be angry about it), then you'll have to alter the upcoming encounters to lower the amount of loot they get until they're back in line with where they should be.
Unintended Consequences
If you just use the wealth rules as-is but also let them get all their previous character's stuff back, you're encouraging them to change characters every time they die. Doing so gives them a major wealth boost.
There's lots of reasons you want to discourage that:

It encourages people to die, and punishes those who don't die by having them fall behind on the wealth curve. That makes everyone reckless.
It absolutely sucks for trying to tell a coherent story in a campaign when new characters are constantly coming and going.
It also sucks for player RP and character development, as the party is constantly changing.

I was in a game once where resurrection was strongly encouraged, because a new character would come in with HALF the wealth of the old character. Granted in the event of a total party wipe he likely wouldn't enforce that, but we wouldn't be able to get the gear back in that case either without so much work that it'd just be an adventure of its own.
If you wanted to retire a character, you would leave the party while alive (with all your gear, so the party gets no wealth boost), and your new one would come in with full equivalent value. As a result, that only happened when someone was unhappy with their character and not because the character wealth chart said they could get ahead by doing it.
Comment: We found divving dead parties members stuff made the living stronger as they tended to share it out before the new character arrived so punishes the dead. The rest I agree with.
Answer: Not Pathfinder, but the 3.5 DMG suggests reducing the amount of gear the new PC receives by the cost of the gear that the old PC has left behind. If the gear is in such a place that it's not immediately retrievable by the new PCs, I would recommend just not counting it at all.
If the PCs wanted to ultimately retrieve that gear later (even if it's right away), I would design the whole thing as an adventure and include the gear as part of that adventure's treasure parcel. If they left behind more gear than you would normally include in an adventure appropriate for their level, then have some of the more powerful items spirited away by some foul creature or nefarous thieves to bring back as villains at a later date.
Answer: The approach that I typically use is to count the value of the dead character's gear as a sort of 'wealth debt' that is repaid by reducing future wealth gains.  I cut all wealth gains in half until the party has fully paid off the value of the dead character's gear.  If the players start being suicidal a lot, then raise the penalties further.
In any case, you should definitely not penalize the new character unless the gear is extremely similar. If my archer dies and I roll a new archer, then I can probably use most of the existing gear as-is without much trouble.  If I change roles, however, then a new character that has wealth penalties will end up at a significant disadvantage because they can't effectively use the dead character's gear.
Another solution that might work is the idea of an honorable burial.  Basically, have the culture that the players are from encourage people to bury fallen allies with the gear they fell in.  Perhaps award roleplaying xp, or other non-gear rewards for following this practice.
Answer: In situations like these, I would honestly let the characters deal with that how they will. If one of your buddies falls in battle, and he's got some shiny stuff, something is going to happen to that shiny stuff (whether it finds its way into an ally's hands, pawned by the party rogue, studied by a wizard, vanquished by a paladin, or thrown into the nearest lake by a magic-hating dwarf.)
If the party has moved on to a point where magical items, gold, experience are now in a more advanced stage, then those players should simply create their new characters at the stage that the rest of the party is in (e.g. start them at the same level as the lowest leveled party member, gift them a reasonable magical item of choice to begin with, give them multiplied starting gold, etc.)
I personally think encouraging going and pilfering your previous body based on player knowledge isn't exactly promoting much roleplaying.
Comment: Welcome to the site! Please take a look at the [tour](http://rpg.stackexchange.com/about) and the [help](http://rpg.stackexchange.com/help); they're a useful introduction to the site. I think the only major stumbling block with this strategy is when the game system uses wealth as a method of character advancement--messing with group wealth can make extra work for the GM further down the road. Got any experience with that you could share? And once you have 20+ rep, feel free to [join the chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/11/rpg-general-chat)!

How to deal with dead characters' gear?


GDP and production

Question: Does an increase in GDP result in a direct increase in production? For example, a 5% increase in GDP results in a 5% increase in production for a country?
Answer: Gross Domestic Product measures production in terms of value (usually "GDP" alone refers to GDP in real terms, while we add the qualifier "nominal GDP" to indicate that we use current prices).
As such an increase in GDP may not be accompanied  by an increase in production as measured in quantity, if this is what the OP asks.
Even if we take out the effect of price inflation, we may have changes in what is produced, such that fewer units are produced but each of a higher value -higher enough so as the overall effect to be an increase in GDP (i.e. in value terms).
Think of a country that produced grain of a given quality. Next year it switches grain variety, and it now cultivates a variety that produces fewer tons of product but it is priced higher because it is considered more healthy.
Or think of car production, where we produce 1 million small cheap cars, and next year we switch to high-end cars. We may now produce a much lower quantity of cars, but each cars costs/is priced much more, and overall we may see an increase in the value of GDP (always speaking in real terms here). But if we want to count the number of end-product units, it has decreased.
Answer: GDP is a statistical indicator which is an estimate of production that has already occurred, or an estimate of the current or future level of production. The units are generally nominal, or adjusted by some variety of methods to correct for different changes in price levels across a changing production structure (e.g., more smartphones, less typewriters).
So I'm not sure if this involves confusion or disagreement about the precise meaning of "GDP", or a misunderstanding about the sequential order of logic. Specifically, the order in time is 1) production occurs, 2) there is a measurement indicator intended to reflect the production which actually occurred.
For an example of how this could be important, consider the following example. Production increases equally across all sectors by 5%. However, a change in price levels can differ from one sector to another. So using some methods the statistical indicator called "GDP" will increase by precisely the same 5%, and according to other methods of calculating GDP it could be different from 5%.
Conceptually, differences in these methods might be straightforward to understand in principle, but implementing the methods can become complicated, and there is liable to be some "art" in determining which method is most appropriate for measurement, or for the use of the statistical indicator called "GDP" depending on the specific application. For example, if exchange rates are very important, such as in trade analysis, "real GDP" could be less important for knowing the effects on the overall budget situation of the government or the cost of capital in the financial system.
Answer: An issue that one must consider is inflation. If an event occurs in a country, (a debt crisis for example) inflation could rise to that extent that in nominal terms GDP increases by 5%. We have seen this in Venezuela over there years where the nominal increase in GDP is irrelevant because it is mostly due to inflation. In that scenario, production in terms of the quantity of goods produced can drop due to input costs, but nominal GDP can rise due to a devaluation of the currency. So GDP does not have to increase as a result of production. But all things being equal, a higher production rate CAN correspond with a higher GDP. The quantity of goods sold leading to an increase in GDP.

GDP and production


The "Best" Blunt Weapon?

Question: So there is a humanoid creature 9 feet (2,75 meters) tall, about 1000 pounds (about 450 kg), and 10 times the strength of even the strongest men. What would be the best one-handed, blunt weapon for him to use assuming he primarily fights regular-sized humans in small groups?
Comment: [Reminder to close-voters](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3773/6986): The problem cannot be fixed if the OP is not made aware of it. That being said, I don't see a problem here. We've accepted this type of question several times before.
Comment: He has a BMI of 62 so approximately spherical in spite of his strength, choice of weapon should take that into account.
Comment: Why is the [tag:magic] tag on this question? You've defined no features of a developed magic system that would have any bearing on which weapon would be the best. As it stands, this question is pretty broad and could do with some more restrictions to get better answers. I'd recommend maintaining a draft in the Sandbox for the time being to get better advice on what needs work so we can answer this better: https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4835/sandbox-for-proposed-questions
Comment: the best blunt weapons is always the one that apply largest force over largest possible area in the quickest time.
Comment: @SZCZERZO KŁY: Those are mutually exclusive. The smaller the area the larger the force - and the heavier a weapon the larger the force, but the slower the blow is.
Comment: @Daniel that's was joke comment that for best blunt weapons making this trifecta is the best. Otherwise you end up with slash/thrust weapon because it will be better.
Comment: @SZCZERZO KŁY: Ok, didn´t get that - my bad ... thou shalt not use irony on the internets for it is lost on the fools out there?
Comment: @Daniel Poe law is against me but I won't stop using language I have master in.
Comment: I should have clarified, he is proportioned much like someone such as Hafthor Bjornsen but is very dense and i didnt mean to add the magic tag but meant to add fantasy, my bad.
Comment: The truth. There's nothing more damaging.
Comment: Well i suppose crushing the mind is just as important as crushing the body lol
Answer: A mace, preferably the leftmost one in the picture below - given the strength of the creature the blunt force should be enough to shatter anything.
All the added bells an whistles on the other maces would increase the chance of getting stuck in an enemies armor or braking/bending under the impact. That would needlessly slow you down when already having enough destructive force. You main concern will be getting swarmed so you need to shift targets quickly
You also would want to make the weapon rather short against regular-sized humans in small groups. If the weapon gets too long it would risk being under-run and unable to act effectively in close quarts. The usual reason for longer weapons do not apply when you are able to shatter any defenses or polearms of your enemies with the flick of a wrist and already have a 50% greater reach.
On anything made of wood the handle would probably shatter after a few blows - given that the creature and thus his hands and the weapons handle are only 50% bigger than a normal human but he has 10x the strength.
Best counter tactic for the humans: Swarm out and attack with ranged weapons or attack with short sword/daggers, surround him and get really close really quick.

(By Samuraiantiqueworld - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Comment: Yeah, one handed blunt weapon pretty much is a mace by definition.
Comment: @VilleNiemi good point. Nevertheless, this answer could be improved by suggesting specifics. For example a 10x stronger man could wield a heavier longer mace than usual, and a 9' man wouldn't want to have to stoop to strike at, or defend against, the more normally proportioned. That might be relevant. He might also want to be able to operate in very close quarters - in what manner would one of, or a combination of several of, those maces offer this?
Comment: @Grimm The Opiner: thanks for the suggestions, tried to improve on the points you mentioned.
Comment: I've been thinking of some ways to counter such tactics such as adding more armor plating on him and giving him a large shield and some good solid boots for kicking the pesky humans
Answer: In battle or in arenas where a gladiator or warrior is used to fighting often, tactics involving protection and maintaining distance are paramount for repeated victory.  Assuming he could get his hands on any equipment, he'd likely favor a long-range weapon that is unobtrusive and a medium-to-short range weapon that still allows him distance without getting hurt.
For the long-range weapon, assuming there are pistols and rifles, a pistol would likely be an excellent compromise.  Kept loaded and ready, he'd likely favor the pistol because it is light and he could get in a shot before having to switch to his medium-to-short range weapon.  He probably would not put much stock into being able to reload it in time for a second shot, meaning he'd load it prior to battle and fire it once before close range fighting.
Against smaller "normal" humans, a polearm would almost certainly allow him to inflict serious blows while keeping his distance.  One of the disadvantages to the polearm is that it is slow, but my guess is that with superior strength, he can more than makeup for that disadvantage.  It has also the considerable advantage that against multiple fighters, a single fast pass can at least destabilize the fighters, but far more likely that they would immediately sustain injuries, armor or not.  He could maintain a distance which would otherwise not be possible at close range by using swords or daggers.
Other short-to-medium ranged weapons would be likely equally suited, as they all depend on maintaining a reasonable distance, but would be difficult to use without significant strength and size.  These include the flail, scythe and lance (though the latter may be less useful against multiple fighters).
Answer: I think any king of fighting stick will work very well, like the ones used in escrima or kali. Better if it is all steel.

Basically, your "giant" hits with so much strength, that any blow would cause broken bones even with a good padded armor.
So he just needs his weapon to be durable (with his height, he'll hit a lot of helmets and push out of his way another weapons), fast (because he is fighting groups) and with a better reach than a one handed mace (because his enemy will probably use spears and halberds against him, so your humanoid will need to take advantage of his longer arms).
Bonus point: sticks can be thrown quite well (there is even a hunting technique based on breaking the legs of your prey by throwing sticks at it and the boomerang was born like this). This will help your "giant" against archers, javelineers, horseriders and, of course, annoying shepherds with a sling.
Answer: A War Hammer would be nice. It allows you to use either the blunt or the pointy side, or even grapple, depending of your needs. With his superior force, your guy could unbalance a foe by grappling his shield, then take a strike in the opening.
Answer: Against who ?
Against another one like himself or against a normal human ?
Against a normal human he can use whatever he want, just the impact force will kill the human (or at least make seriuous damages) so even a little tree (for him) can do the kill.
Against another of his own kind, you are back to a human-human like fight (even if bigger scale), so the "rules" for humans apply, I'd say a sword for duel and a bow for long range shots.
Comment: I'm hesitant to upvote this since it's really more of a comment on the question's premise, but you do bring up some good points.
Answer: Ball and Chain
At 20 kg (44 lbs) or more, it allows your creature to put all of it's great strength to work.
Attached to a chain, it also allows the creature's whole 9 feet, plus maybe another two feet of chain length (11ft / 3.3m total) to be put into multiplying the creatures great strength $ v = \sqrt { 2 \times length \times acceleration } $
A chain also can be accelerated faster than a solid rod because you don't have to put your whole body into it. If the average strength of a human is (100kg x 1 gee acceleration = 1kN), then your creature's strength is 10kN. Then the acceleration on a 20kg ball is around 500 m/s/s. Using the velocity equation, is about 57 meters per second. Convert that into kinetic energy with $ E = {1\over2} mass \times velocity^2 $ = 60 kJ, or roughly the impacting power of a car at 20 miles per hour. And that's without a good wind-up.

By contrast, with a solid weapon, your creature's whole body weight is put into the swing. This works against it in the velocity component, only allowing about 2 m/s on a good swing (roughly equivalent to what a human would do). On the other hand, most of the 1,000 pounds of the creature's body weight is keeping the solid weapon moving. Net is roughly 2 kJ.
With the chain, you can sweep large groups of people at once. Also, since the weapon doesn't require any high degree of craftsmanship, it's cheap and easy to produce or replace.
Comment: Oh dear!! First, that image isn't a weapon, it's a restraint. Second, there's no weapon called a ball and chain. There were flails, and the chain was often surprisingly short. Your physics is complete baloney. You might be able to salvage this answer by pivoting to making the case for a flail.
Comment: Grimm, I'm not sure where you're coming from. Is this sarcasm, or do you really not recognize a swinging heavy weight could hurt people? Official Medieval Weaponry was not a requirement of the original post,  and I'll check but I don't think the medieval tag implies it either. The questioner is asking for a weapon for a creature ten times as strong and nearly twice as tall as an average adult. As to the physics : s = .5 at^2 + vt; v = at. Solve for v in terms of s: t = v/a. Sub into position equation - s = .5 a (v/a)^2. Reduce: s = .5 v^2 / a. Solve for v: v^2 = 2sa; v = sqrt(2sa).
Comment: You've overestimated human strength by a factor of 10. Your final speed of the ball seems to be based on accelerating it over the height of the humanoid, which isn't how the ball is accelerated at all - it's done by centripetal force. No clue what you're getting at with the last paragraph about chain vs. solid weapon.
Comment: The original post asks for weapons for a creature with ten times the strength of a human. As for human strength, being able to lift what I think is a reasonable for someone physically active 100kg (220 lbs) is 100kg x 10 m/s/s in gravity = 1,000N, or 1kN for the human (10kN for the questioner's ten times human strength creature). As for the centripedal force, it's being provided by the creature.
Answer: Caber.

https://www.scotland.com/blog/caber-toss-scotland/

Keeps smaller enemies at a distance via sweeping action.

Offers a field effect - the entire length of the caber.

Cannot get tangled.

Offers a method to retain kinetic energy.  A mace you have to stop with muscle power or follow through and hit the ground.  The caber you can keep spinning 360 degrees as you advance - like a claymore sword.

A greenwood caber would be unlikely to break.

Easy to replace your greenwood caber if you have access to a forest.

If you are feeling mean, don't trim the branches off your greenwood caber down to such smoothness.
Comment: This doesn't really look like a one-handed weapon, even for someone 9 feet tall. Actually, it doesn't really look like a weapon at all. Why specifically go for "caber" instead of "big stick"? Not sure how you keep this thing spinning 360 degrees, unless you're doing it over your head, which give plenty of clearance for average-sized people.
Comment: You could make a case for using a tree trunk (thin enough - or shaped - to be grasped one handed) but a caber is not that. Again, if you pivot to explaining why waving a big lump of wood is a good idea you might be able to salvage something here.
Comment: @Nuclear Wang:  A caber is already the right size for a 9 foot tall giant to use it as a [long staff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarterstaff) which is roughly double the height of its user.  I called it a caber instead of a "giant sized long staff" because there are images readily available to show how big a caber is, which gives an idea of the effect it would have against normal sized humans.  Re "not sure" - you can spin a staff around your body along many different axes.  At a high school football game you will see the color guard spin flag on staffs around their waists.

The "Best" Blunt Weapon?


Learning rate of 0 still changes weights in Keras

Question: I just trained a model (SGD) with keras and was wondering why the change of accuracy and loss from epoch to epoch doesn't really decrease that much when I lower the learning rate. So I tested what happens when I set the learning rate to 0 and to my surprise, accuracy and loss still changed from epoch to epoch and I can't find an explanation for that. Does anyone know why this could be happening?
Answer: If your learning rate is set lower, training will progress very slowly because you are making very tiny updates to the weights. However, if you set learning rate higher, it can cause undesirable divergent behavior in your loss function. So when you set learning rate lower you need to set higher number of epochs.
The reason for change when you set learning rate to 0 is beacuse of Batchnorm. If you have batchnorm in your model, remove it and try.
Look at these link, link
Comment: Thanks, it must have been the batch normalization. After removing it, it does not seem to change anymore.


IIS - Login prompt when browsing by IP

Question: Web server is IIS 7.  Browsing by FQDN works fine.  However, browsing by IP a login prompt appears.  I saw this blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jiruss/archive/2007/04/13/can-t-browse-site-by-ip-address-that-requires-authentication-page-cannot-be-displayed.aspx and I confirmed that Enable HTTP Keep Alive is checked.  In IE if I add the IP address to the Local intranet sites then I can browse via IP address.  So my question is - is there something else on IIS that needs to configured to allow browsing by IP?  Or is this not IIS related?
Comment: Can you post a screenshot of your bindings for the website in question?
Answer: This is IE related; it will automatically pass your Windows login credentials to pages that request authentication, if that page is hosted on a server in the Intranet zone (i.e. using the same DNS suffix as your machine.) Don't quote me on that but it's my understanding.
If all clients are in a domain and you require IP browsing, you can deploy a GPO that adds that IP to the Intranet zone. Otherwise work on your DNS infrastructure so that FQDN browsing will work.
Other browsers don't have this issue because they don't give out your Windows login credentials; some consider this a good thing :)
Answer: This is a feature of Internet Explorer Security.
Basically IE uses the logic that if the address requested contains periods and is not listed in the Local Intranet sites list, the site is relegated to the Internet zone which by default has the most restrictive security settings.
From: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303650

This behavior may occur if an FQDN or IP address contains periods. If
  an FQDN or IP address contains a period, Internet Explorer identifies
  the Web site or share as in the Internet zone.

In your case Windows Authentication wouldn't pass credentials to what it considers an Internet site, hence the prompt for credentials.

IIS - Login prompt when browsing by IP


Do we ever need more then 1 hidden layer in a binary classification problem with ANNs? If yes why?

Question: I have read about the universal approximation theorem. So, why do we need more than 1 layer? Is it somehow computationally efficient to add layers instead of more neurons in the hidden layer?
Comment: I would highly recommend watching this introductory lecture by [DeepMind x UCL](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBggC-XVF4M) (34:00 - 40:00) which explains the Universal Approximation Theorem in an intuitive way.
Comment: @orion_ix wow, that video is fantastic! It explained why we go deep instead of wide in a very insightful way thanks for recommendation!
Answer: This is akin to asking "Why do we need more than one instance of sine to represent any repeating function" or "why can't we represent any polynomial with an equivalent polynomial of just the first degree?"  There are many, many problems... I'd even want to say most... that will require more than one layer to solve because the higher dimensional relationships cannot be well represented by just one layer.  This is not to say that the theorem is wrong, but consider the applied aspects.  We can approximate any continuous function, but that might require a single layer that is infinitely wide, however that same function might be approximated by a deep network having only a few dozen neurons.
However, this is not to say that many networks could not be represented with networks that perform at least as well, or perhaps even better, by simpler networks of fewer layers/neurons.  There is active research into how to generalize this.
Ultimately, non-trivial problems often require an empirical approach in this space currently because there is no general solution to "learning."
Comment: I think what you have answered is not correct in fact due to universal approximation theorem, we can approximate any higher dimensional function with only one hidden layer.
Comment: @prakharnigam I think that the idea that this answer tries to convey is correct. You may be able to approximate your function with only one sine-like function by increasing e.g. the frequency, but you may do that more efficiently with a combination of multiple functions (and that's why using always a 1-hidden layer net is not typically done). Note that the universal approximation theorem (by Cybenko) tells you that you can **approximate** any continuous function, but provided that the number of neurons in the hidden layer is **sufficiently large**.
Comment: As I stated above, the UAT tells you that, _in theory_, you can approximate a continuous function with a 1-hidden layer (with an arbitrary width) neural network, but it doesn't tell you how to do it _in practice_. I don't know the exact mathematical answer to your question, but we can say that, _in practice_, in many cases, neural networks with more than 1 hidden layer are used (probably because they are more effective). You may be interested in [this post](https://ai.stackexchange.com/q/20680/2444) (and the related/linked posts and papers).
Comment: @prakharnigam I just read a paper last week that I'm having trouble finding that might be helpful as well...  The topic was a new approach toward leaf and edge pruning in networks for graph connection pruning of weights and neuron pruning.. This is connected to the tendency for only a handful of neurons and the connections to following layers driving the majority of the accuracy in a network..  That isn't your question, but I suspect you'll find it is very much related.
Comment: Yes, that's my point @nbro , thanks.
Comment: @nbro I was asking, whether increasing layers is more efficient or adding neurons and why. That answer was a very generic one, of course i know what he is trying to convey but it is not rigorous and incorrect in some parts like saying " that will require more than one layer to solve because the higher dimensional relationships cannot be well represented by just one layer", well every higher dimensional relationship that is continuous can be represented by one hidden layer.
Comment: @nbro Thanks! That post along with papers linked might be helpful.
Comment: thanks for recommending, will see it too.


Misunderstanding in deriving Newton's law from Euler-Lagrange equation

Question: When deriving Newton's law from Euler-Lagrange equation for a particle, the Lagrangian is defined as the kinetic energy minus the potential energy, but the problem is that the kinetic energy is defined as the work needed to raise the velocity of the particle to the current velocity and when deriving the kinetic energy expression we use Newton's equation in the derivation since the work done equals force times distance and the force is substituted by m*a.
My point is that we used Newton's law to derive the kinetic energy from the work definition to find the Lagrangian and feed it to Euler-Lagrange equations to get back Newton's law, so I don't think that we "derived" Newton's law or is something wrong?
Comment: see also https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/117017/how-do-you-determine-the-lagrangian
Answer:
Lagrangian is defined as the kinetic energy minus the potential energy

You are wrong. Lagrangian has nothing to do with kinetic and potential energy. For example Einstein-Hilbert action is $S=\frac{1}{2k}\int R\sqrt{-g}\,d^4x$. There is no fast-hand way to see in there something like "potential" and "kinetic" energy.
There is only one true definition of Lagrangian. It is what makes our system to move along the path $S=\int L d\Omega=\max$. In every good book it is emphasized that this is simple coincidence of $L$ to have relation with energy. It is not random coincidence, but quite wonderful. But it is coincidence.
In mechanics it just happens that for certain type of simplest systems the underlying Lagrangian is connected to energies. Being that system slightly more complex, for example within nonlinear coordinates, you won't have same $\frac12 mV^2$ but some bilinear form of your coordinate space.
You need to understand the connections of things, so they present for you the most obvious and simplest systems where you can put a finger and say that "this is energy". It is energy exactly because energy is invariant of your system, same as the invariants of your system are what comes from variation of action.
Comment: @sanaris, within the regime of the question, i.e. Classical Mechanics, $\mathcal{L}=T-V$ is a completely correct formula. Its not just for 'simple' systems i.e. it works completely for the double pendulum which isn't a 'simple' system. And I wouldn't refer to it as a mere coincidence, its not. And where does your 'true definition' $S=\int \mathcal{L} d\Omega = \text{max}$ come from? What is max? And why does the action equate to it?
Comment: @GRrocks right I realize this but I'm not sure from reading the OP's question that the question deals with fields.  It seems to deal with point particles.
Comment: I'm puzzled by this.  Suppose I have a 1d harmonic oscillator.  The action does NOT have this form: if anything it's not $\int d^4x$.  Moreover what is the sense of a metric in a 1d configuration space?  Wouldn't it be trivial?  And what is $R$?  Even more simply, suppose I have a free particle. What would $R$ be?  Not saying you're incorrect just wondering how this "comes down" to ordinary physics.
Comment: @ZeroTheHero there is good links for Feynman lectures and more https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Einstein-Hilbert_action&redirect=no
Comment: @ZeroTheHero perhaps it is useful to point out, in the context of field theory, the difference of the Lagrangian(which is a FUNCTIONAL of $\phi(\cdot,t)$), and the Lagrangian density(which is a FUNCTION of $\phi(x,t)$ ), the latter is what goes in with $d^4x$(the 4 parameters that enter the theory). In point mechanics, there is no density-the only parameter is $t$, everything else being dynamical variables. There is no need for a Jacobian, there is no need for a $\sqrt{g}$, etc. Ofcourse, even in ordinary QM, the only parameter is $t$, and the above argument carries. Or am I missing something?
Comment: @ZeroTheHero I think I might agree with you; the premise is point mechanics here.
Answer: 1) The Lagrangian is simply a function of generalised coordinates and velocities(see also @sanaris above), which when put into an action and extremised gives you the time evolution of the coordinates(and thus, the velocities via differentiation). You do not know the trajectory, and thus the velocity, and thus the kinetic energy, before you have actually solved for $q(t)$. A priori, it is just some coordinate, with nothing to do with actual motion.
2) In fact, you can only interpret $\frac{1}{2}m\dot{q}^2$ as kinetic energy of the particle if $\dot{q}$ IS indeed the velocity-which happens only if you've already solved for $q(t)$. Only then can you define $\dot{q}(t)\equiv v$. This ofcourse is equivalent to having solved for $q(t)$ by Newton's equations, and then you can call it kinetic energy.
3) In a nutshell, you can assign meanings such as 'energy' to terms in the Lagrangian only AFTER you've solved the Euler Lagrange equations, and plugged in the actual $q(t)$ which the particle follows. Since his is identical to solving for $q(t)$ from Newton's equations, so all is consistent. Things like 'energy' only make sense on-shell, e.g. the Hamiltonian $H(q,p)$ is total energy ONLY WHEN $q,p$ solve Hamilton's equations. Otherwise it's a generic function.
Comment: yeah I think also this captures the subtle point about considering $\dot{q}$ and $q$ as *independent* coordinates in the Lagrange equations of motion.
Answer: You are right. The Newtonian and Lagrangian formulations are equivalent. Either can be used as a starting point for mechanics. Which you think more fundamental is largely a matter of personal choice.
My own preference is to formulate Newton's laws from conservation of momentum (the third law contains the physical content, the second just a definition of force). Conservation of momentum appears as a fundamental principle in general relativity, and can actually be proven for particle interactions in relativistic quantum theory. Others find the Lagrangian formulation appealing.
Comment: but isn't the principle of least action is more fundamental and leads to Lagrangian formalism?
Comment: interesting viewpoint, what made you think like this?
Comment: Some people think so, but my own view is that action is just a formula in mathematics, not a fundamental physical principle.
Comment: @CharlesFrancis, as far as I understand a physical principle is supposed to explain the behavior of systems and principle of least action describes the dynamics very accurately. As you said it is largely a matter of taste, but could you please elaborate more on why conservation of momentum is more appealing as a fundamental law? I believe there are very good points that I have not observed.
Comment: This isn't the right place for a discussion. I have a chat room, https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/106297/particles-or-fields which would be better.
Answer: In Lagrangian mechanics, we take the kinetic & potential terms as axiomatic, i.e. we don't use Newton's second law to justify $K=\frac12m\dot{x}^2$, we just claim $K=\frac12m\dot{x}^2$. Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics (and a few other options) are equivalent, but they assume different things.

Misunderstanding in deriving Newton’s law from Euler-Lagrange equation


Is there such a thing as $coW[1]$-hardness?

Question: I have a problem $\mathsf{A}$ and I would like to analyze its (parameterized) computational complexity.
I found a parameterized reduction from the complement of the independent set ($\mathsf{coIS}$) problem (i.e. given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, is there no independent set of size $k$ in G?), such that there is a parameter $\kappa$ to my new problem $\mathsf{A}$ that only increases by a constant in regards to $k$.
Formally, I have found a reduction function $R$, that takes as input an instance $(G, k)$ of $\mathsf{coIS}$, where $G$ is an arbitrary undirected graph and $k \in \mathbf{N}$ is some integer, and outputs an instance $(I, \kappa)$ of problem $\mathsf{A}$, such that:

$(G, k) \in \mathsf{coIS} \Leftrightarrow (I, \kappa) \in \mathsf{A}$ (alternatively: $(G, k) \not\in \mathsf{IS} \Leftrightarrow (I, \kappa) \in \mathsf{A}$).
$R$ runs in $f(k) \cdot |G|^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ time, where $f$ is some computable function (in our case, $f$ is polynomial).
$\kappa \leq h(k)$, where $h$ is some computable function.

From this, I infer that problem $\mathsf{A}$ is coNP-hard. However, I would also like to make a statement about the parameterized complexity of problem $\mathsf{A}$. My intuition tells me that problem $\mathsf{A}$ is $coW[1]$-hard when parameterized by $\kappa$.
However, I have not been able to find any reference to the class $coW[1]$ in the literature or in any previously asked question. Given that my understanding of the class $W[1]$ and the $W$-hierarchy is somewhat primitive, I don't know if the notion of $coW[1]$ makes any sense. I could well imagine that $W[1] = coW[1]$ holds, but I don't know how one would prove such a statement.
Answer: The paper The Parameterized Complexity of Local Consistency by Gaspers and Szeider discusses coW[1]- and coW[2]-complete problems. This is maybe a starting point.


Where to start with finding good companies to invest?

Question: I know its a general question but where do you start with value investing and finding undervalued companies? There must be a quick way to find a list of undervalued good companies?
Thanks
Answer: There obviously is not such a list of companies, because if there were the whole world would immediately invest in them. Their price would rise like a rocket and they would not be undervalued anymore.
Some people think company A should be worth x per share, some people think it should be worth y. If the share price is currently higher than what someone thinks it should be, they sell it, and if it is lower than they think it should be they buy it.
The grand effect of this all is that the current market price of the share is more or less the average of what all investors together think it should currently be worth.
If you buy a single stock, hoping that it's undervalued and will rise, you may be right but you may equally well be wrong. It's smarter to diversify over lots of stocks to reduce the impact of this risk, it evens out.
There are "analysts" who try to make a guess of which stocks will do better, and they give paid advice or you can invest in their funds -- but they invariably do worse than the average of the market as a whole, over the long term.
So the best advice for amateurs is to invest in index funds that cover a huge range of companies and try to keep their costs very low.
Comment: I would argue P/E is a good way to start a list and go from there for the most part in forming a 'list' of undervalued companies.  But I agree if you have to ask the question the OP asked stick to ETF's or index funds.
Comment: @Ross: an answer that explains about that sort of thing would be a good addition to mine, I'd say.


SSL on SharePoint

Question: I am facing some problems on SharePoint.
I've got a SharePoint site (let's say HTTP : //intranet.domain.be)
We wanted to use this intranet from outside.
So we decided to set an Extranet (HTTPS : //intranet.domain.be)
To do so, we installed a SSL certificate. Everything is going well but one thing.
on HTTP, i can check out, open, edit a document like a word document.
on HTTPS, i try to open the same file but when i do so, a pop up appears and ask to select a certificate.
None of them doesn't allow me to open the file :s
Does Anyone have any idea what's going on?
I checked the SSL implementation, the SP config, but everything seems to be ok...
Let me know if you have an idea.
Answer: Your IIS SSL configuration is not right, you are mixing client certificates with SSL server certificates. You want to use SSL Server certificates for the site, not client certificates. Disable client certificates, and configure correct SSL certificate in IIS web site bindings.
Review the article for details here.

SSL on SharePoint


In VB6 is linking to a tlb generated from an ocx the same as linking to an ocx directly

Question: The reason I am asking is I have an ocx that I don't want to register on the build machine but I would still like to build against it.  If the tlb route is not the right direction any hints on how to accomplish this would be appreciated.
Answer: Yes. It's the same thing.
The TypeLib is the metadata of the OCX.
Answer: If you own the Enterprise Edition you may create a stand-alone Type Library by selecting the "Remote Server Files" checkbox that you find in the Component tab of the Project Properties dialog box. When you then compile the component, Visual Basic will also create two additional files in the same directory as the executable file. One of these two files is the TLB you were looking for.
Found here and confirmed to work with VB6 Enterprise Edition.
Otherwise you have to use OLEVIEW in the Visual Studio 6.0 tool to copy the IDL and compile it using the MIDL compiler into a TLB file.


STM32: Saving 50Mbit/s data in sdram or sd card

Question: Could STM32f429 save image data to sdram or sd card? Camera module outputs its data at a data rate of 50Mbit/s via 8 parallel ports. What I want to do is to save this data into the SDRAM or SD card as a file. It doesn't have to be sequence of files, because I need just one frame. In order to access the sd card, I would use SPI. But I wonder if there is any issue in this process. For example, one said that interrupts in cpu cause data loss and I must find FPGA or CPLD. But I'm afraid that I couldn't understand what he meant.
Comment: Are you using a specific device from the STM32F4 lineup? They differ quite a lot in terms of performance and peripherals available, the answer to your question will probably depend on the exact device you use. If possible link to a datasheet of the camera as well.
Comment: I added model number. But it's interesting that you mean some of the STM32F4 would be able to save data, but others wouldn't. Is it true? I heard that this is general issue for MCUs.
Answer: As you are using one of the most powerful STM32F4, it might be possible. I haven't done something on the scale of that, but let's have a look at what the F429 can offer:
First to get the data (datasheet page 40):

Digital camera interface (DCMI)
The devices embed a camera interface that can connect with camera modules and CMOS
  sensors through an 8-bit to 14-bit parallel interface, to receive video data. The camera
  interface can sustain a data transfer rate up to 54 Mbyte/s at 54 MHz. It features:
• Programmable polarity for the input pixel clock and synchronization signals
• Parallel data communication can be 8-, 10-, 12- or 14-bit
• Supports 8-bit progressive video monochrome or raw bayer format, YCbCr 4:2:2
  progressive video, RGB 565 progressive video or compressed data (like JPEG)
• Supports continuous mode or snapshot (a single frame) mode
• Capability to automatically crop the image

Sounds like a good fit for your application. You are running at 50Mbit/s (6.25MB/s), so it should be easily able to handle that and the interface is hopefully compatible with your camera module.
Next you will have to store that data somewhere. There are several options available there:
The SDIO interface supports a SD card with 4 bit data bus and 25MHz clock (refernece manual page 1013), so it should be able to put out the needed 6.25MB/s. I'm not sure about the overhead though. Also the question arises how you would handle a filesystem in that time. (How much data is actually needed?)
So another option is to use the external memory interface, the FMC. It offers a huge variety of options on what to use (see reference manual page 1588). At speeds up to 90MHz it should be able to easily cope with the 6.25MB/s.
At these kind of transaction speeds, you want to bring down the use of the core as much as possible. So you should use the DMA to handle most of the data shovelling. The DMA supports all the before mentioned peripherals, so it should be usable and doable.
Again, I haven't done anything on this scale and am mostly concerned with low power stuff, but based on the specs of the F429, it should be possible (not easily maybe but we all like a good challenge don't we?)
Edit: I just realized that you want to interface to the SD card via SPI. SPI won't cut it on the STM32F429 as it is limited to 45MBit/s, you have to use the mentioned SDIO interface for higher speeds.
Comment: Thank you for the nice explanation, but please let me ask once again. Could the interrupts make problem during the data writing process? I'm scared because one said that even we use DMA interrupts on cpu could cause some problem. I'm sorry for this question, but this is so serious for us that we would change whole plans, if it is the case...


Is it possible to create a trust without any beneficiaries

Question: Is it possible to create a trust without any beneficiaries or one in which the beneficiaries could not 1) change the terms of the trust, and 2) retrieve anything from the trust?
Comment: So what is the trust supposed to do with its assets or income, if not give them to a beneficiary?
Comment: Can you elaborate on how it should operate, and what those conditions would be?  I don't think you can have a trust that is required to just sit on its assets in perpetuity.
Comment: Operate under a very strict set of predefined conditions
Comment: Currently it is possible to set up a trustless ownerless coop using blockchain technology that can do a number of things, I am looking for a way to create one that could own property and/or run businesses
Comment: There would be a number of tokens that would have voting rights on anything submitted to the trust, for example the appointment and pay of a CEO of a company that the trust owns controlling share.
Comment: In what way should this be different from just having a corporation?  Why do you think it specifically needs to be a trust?
Comment: Token holders would be anonamous and would have no legal right or recourse to equity in the the companies owned by the trust
Comment: The company would effectively be ownerless
Comment: There is no such thing as an "ownerless cooperative", although there are arguably ownerless entities which are often called "non-profits". But, the purpose of the entity matters and can't be ignored when evaluating the legality of the enterprise or the regulations to which it is subject.
Comment: Ownerless cooperatives are new, for example Bitcoin is an ownerless cooperative. There are decentralized exchanges, for example the bitshares DEX, and there can be ownerless investment cooperatives, for example the Ethereum DAO which was an ownerless venture capital fund raised over $150 million from anonamous contributions in 2016
Comment: Ethereum DAO is organized under Swiss law, but basically a ticking time bomb of liability from a legal perspective for both its participants and organizers under securities laws, tax laws, and money laundering laws, with respect to U.S. participants and its marketing of investments to them. It is an anonymous shareholder owned company, not a cooperative nor an ownerless entity by any reasonable definition. It is functionally investor owned corporation, just like a publicly held company, but with direct shareholder governance rather than director intermediated governance.
Comment: Bitcoin, in contrast, is much harder to fit into any regulatory categorization. It has strong features of a producers cooperative because it generates fees for bitcoin miners. But, it has a lot in common with historical private currencies that were once common.
Comment: The Ethereum DAO and other crypto VC funds are usually developed by a non profit but are not organized under any law. Their purpose is to invest in crypto ICO's exclusively and operate in a space that would be very difficult to enforce any regulation upon.
Comment: Ethereum DAO is organized under the Swiss limited liability company law, not a non-profit and not without regard to any law. The notion that you can operate without regard to any law is not reality, although you can be subtle about the law that applies and de-emphasize it. If you design your system deliberate to be difficult to enforce any regulation upon you are at grave risk of a draconian response, quite possibly involving the criminal justice system or forfeitures, because you are setting yourself against the law. Business has to cooperate with the law, not evade it, to survive.
Answer: Non-Profits Need Not Have Owners But Must Have A Lawful Purpose
Any non-profit company, for example, a 501(c)(3), is ownerless and can be run by a self-perpetuating board if desired, rather than having delegates that provide an outside source for new board members. In that case you have to set forth a purpose of the company or trust, to which its assets and profits must be used, and it must be managed in accordance with that purpose. You can also have a "private foundation" that is effectively ownerless, again with a designated charitable purpose.
Generally speaking, the law limits how much compensation can be paid to officers and employees of such a company and restricts self-dealing transactions by such a company.
You probably cannot create a valid trust or business with no beneficiaries and no designated charitable purpose which is supposed to merely accumulate its profits and assets.
Ownerless Cooperatives Are An Oxymoron
Your reference in this and other posts to an "ownerless cooperative" is basically an oxymoron.
A cooperative is an entity owned by a class of people who have a contractual relationship with the entity (usually consumers or producers) who are the owners of the company with voting control and who are entitled to an adjustment of their transaction prices with the cooperative via a rebate or surplus check proportionate to the dollar volume of their dealings with the cooperative (Northwest Mutual, must rural electric companies, and most credit unions would be examples of consumer cooperatives, Ocean Spray is a good example of a producers cooperative).
An ownerless entity is pretty much by definition not a cooperative.
An excellent overview of forms of entity organization other than investor owned stock corporations can be found in The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann.
The Life Of The Law Is Not Math Or Logic
Honestly, it sounds like, in your several posts on the subject, that you are attempting the hide the ball of an ulterior purposes which is material to the legality and organization of an entity.
The law is not like science or mathematics. You can't prove a bunch of isolated propositions and then string them together logically. The law operates on an entire comprehensive "fact pattern" and even if every step of your chain of reasoning to an ultimately result is supported by legal authority, this does not mean that this will be the result you get when you put all of the pieces together. That kind of logical reasoning doesn't work in a legal context. The heading of this section is a paraphrase of a famous statement about the law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The
  law embodies the story of a nation's development through many
  centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the
  axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

from "The Common Law" (1881) at page 1.
Blockchains Are Not The Legal Innovation That They Claim To Be
Using blockchain technology to manage "tokens" of voting control in an entity is ultimately completely irrelevant. Blockchain technology is just another alternative to certificated shares, shares kept on an ownership ledger, or shares kept through secondary shareholding intermediaries or brokers. The technology used to keep track of voting control or economic ownership is irrelevant, and some common entities (e.g. homeowner's associations) have ownership that is basically determined via a crude public blockchain called the county clerk and recorder's records.
People who think that blockchains provide any significant legal innovation into anything (e.g. here) are fundamentally misguided and typically are not people familiar with the law who have misconceptions about how the law works.
Also, contrary to the hype, blockchains are not fraud-proof and indeed, involve serious systemic risks of instability because an error in an old transaction can disrupt lots of current claims. Claims such as those made here that blockchain transactions are irrefutable are naive and basically false. A block chain is a bit like a real property record system without an adverse possession rule to make ancient glitches irrelevant.
Moreover, blockchains are a solution to a non-problem. Authenticating ownership and voting rights, economic entitlements, and corporate actions is something that has never posed a very significant economic problem ever since writing was invented. These are economic problems that were already effectively solved in the days of the Minoans, and widespread ownership of well authenticated entities by numerous ever shifting groups of owners was a problem well in hand by the days of the British East India Company.
Anonymous Ownership Or Contribution Records Are Illegal
Truly anonymous ownership, however, is legally prohibited, even though ownership need not be made a matter of public record.

In the case of for profit entities, by securities regulation which requires disclosure for purposes of exercising voting rights and for disclosing large blocks of ownership as required by law, and for purposes of tax law.
In the case of non-profit entities, it is prohibited by virtue of laws regulating private foundations that impose tax requirements when certain concentrations of contributions come from a small, related group of people.
In the case of political organizations, campaign finance laws require disclosure.
Comment: "Claims such as those made here that blockchain transactions are irrefutable are naive and basically false." -- For instance, the DAO (an Ethereum-based project) turned out to have a "bug" that allowed someone to withdraw arbitrary amounts of money, and someone did. Despite pre-exploit claims that "the code is the authoritative set of rules," this was considered a bug and Ethereum hard-forked to reverse the withdrawals.
Comment: +1 for subheadings that, when read together, are a summary of the whole text. Reminds me of a Government Accountability Office report I once read. Good memories. Thanks.
Comment: I never claimed that blockchains are irrefutable, obviously they are only as good as they are programmed. An ownerless cooperative is basically an organization that owes no rights to it's members. Confidence and trust is placed in the blockchain rather than the law. For example there is no recourse for stolen bitcoins or failed ICO's. It is a system that works quite well for network based projects allowing them to raise funds, self govern and trade their digital assets - I would like to see this at work for brick and mortar businesses.
Comment: @Anon If an organization owes no rights to its members it isn't a cooperative from a legal perspective under either securities law, or tax law, or corporate law, although it might be a non-profit. The notion that an organization can deny legal recourse for stolen bitcoins or failed ICO's is doubtful - this isn't something private parties can due unilaterally. If it is used to raise funds, it is very likely illegal. If it is used to govern anonymously, it is likewise very likely illegal. Bitcoin itself hovers on the edge of money laundering liability exposure when used to trade digital assets.
Comment: @PatrickConheady That particular style in legal writing is almost entirely the work of dedicated legal writing scholar and advocate Bryan Garner.
Answer: The legal concept of a trust originates in English trust law. Virtually all common law jurisdictions have varied or added to this body of law, but I will refer to English law as a useful starting point. A full answer to your question is impossible without specifying a particular transaction involving particular property and people in a particular jurisdiction.
A trust without beneficiaries?
The three certainties are a necessary condition for the validity of  a trust. The third certainty is the certainty of object or beneficiaries. Generally, a trust which has no beneficiaries at all must be a charitable trust – a trust for the public benefit, which can be enforced by a public officer.
Certainty of beneficiaries no longer requires that it is possible to enumerate a complete list of the beneficiaries. It is sufficient to satisfy the 'in or out' test, meaning that it must be possible to say whether any given person is 'in or out' of the class of beneficiaries: McPhail v Doulton [1971] AC 424. So, a non-charitable trust must have beneficiaries, but it need not have a fixed list of named beneficiaries. A trust where the beneficiaries are the class of people holding particular tokens or units is known as a unit trust.
A trust the terms of which the beneficiaries cannot change?
The beneficiaries of a trust are generally not entitled to change its terms. Modern trusts are usually governed by the terms of a deed of trust, which will frequently make provision for its own amendment. Often, it is possible for the trustees to amend the trust deed without the consent of the beneficiaries – perhaps subject to the approval of an 'appointor' or 'guardian.'
The lack of an express power to amend the trust deed may render the trust unworkable in unforeseen situations. Many jurisdictions have a statute conferring power on a court to modify the terms of a trust in these circumstances, such as the Variation of Trusts Act 1958 (UK).
A trust the property of which cannot be demanded by the beneficiaries?
A discretionary trust is a trust in which the distribution of the trust property is left to the discretion of the trustees. The trustees may be required to exercise their discretion according to rules set out in the deed of trust. Subject to any such rules, the beneficiary of a discretionary trust has no fixed interest in the trust property and is therefore not entitled to demand it.
However, the terms of a discretionary trust can go only so far. Where all beneficiaries agree, the rule in Saunders v Vautier allows the beneficiaries to demand the distribution of the trust property, bringing the trust to an end. By terminating the trust and establishing a new trust, the terms of a trust can effectively be amended by the agreement of all beneficiaries. So, while it is possible to prevent any one beneficiary from accessing trust property, it is not generally possible to prevent all beneficiaries from acting together to terminate or vary a trust.


Can I just make tons of mutagens by handing them off to other people?

Question: The rules state that it takes an hour to brew a mutagen, and that you can create more than one, but only the currently brewed mutagen is active. However, it also states that if a mutagen were to leave your possession, it becomes inert until you "pick it back up again". Is it possible to just make a mutagen, have a person hold onto it, and make a new one, repeating the process, then simply grabbing one making it active again when needed? Or does the "becomes inert when another is made" supercede everything? Also, is there any way to make an inert mutagen no longer inert? I haven't been able to find much on this.
Comment: Are you looking for some sort of loophole to exploit here based on RAW? or are you asking about the intent of the rules?
Answer: This would mostly be up to your DM and how he wants to interpret the rules and if one supersedes the other.
Personally I would say the rule stating a mutagen "becomes inert when another is made" supersedes everything.
There is also already a mechanic for creating extra mutagens via the
Discovery Infuse Mutagen.

When the alchemist creates a mutagen he can infuse it with an extra bit of his own magical power. This inflicts 2 points of Intelligence damage to the alchemist and costs 1,000 gp in rare reagents, but the mutagen created persists on its own and is not rendered inert if the alchemist creates another mutagen.

Also as Metool pointed out other Alchemists can drink each-others mutagens. Reading the rules how you are there would be nothing stopping them from making dozens of mutagens and giving them to each-other to use.
Answer: RAW there is some conflicting text and there is no definition for the term 'inert' used in both situations it is used and therefore opens the door to whatever GM interpretation/reasoning.
However, I feel intent of the rules is to only allow 1 'active' mutagen and that the remainder of the previously created mutagens would not ever work if consumed.  Without such intent, we are left with some inconsistencies and what appears to useless options and some possible game imbalances.
Some examples from the rules:

The existence of the Infuse Mutagen discovery. This discovery allows you to create and maintain a second mutagen without the other becoming inert. This is an expensive option, as it basically cost 1000GP + the equivalent of a feat to do, while the suggestion of handing the mutagens to others is mostly free.
Text from the mutagen section of d20pfsrd illustrating the fact that only the most recent mutagen created by the alchemist works.

(Although if the other alchemist creates a different mutagen, the
  effects of the "stolen" mutagen immediately cease.)

Further, allowing an alchemist to stock up and store mutagens or recovering inert mutagens quickly (normally takes 1 hour each, but you could make tones weeks or years in advance during downtime) is basically granting the class the best ability score bonus (and other benefits when using archetypes like beastmorph) for the current situation at any time with few trade-offs and no cool down. They just need a clever way to carry them around and maybe 1 or 2 rounds of time to retrieve the correct mutagen and consume it.
Comment: Can I get a reason from the downvoter?
Comment: Declaring "this is intent", undervaluing action cost and opportunity cost. In a non-combat scenario where time is of the essence, you may be dropping 1-2 mutagens to get the one you need. in combat, a move action to draw a weapon and a move action to draw the first mutagen and drop it, leaving you standing like an idiot with no buff at all. Quick Draw lessens the action load, allowing you a second move action to draw the next extract, but it may not even be the one you need. Alternately, you could have spent a move action to draw a chosen potion or extract and a standard action to imbibe it.
Comment: At a certain point, mutagens last long enough for you to prepare a new mutagen all while under the effects of the old, as well (not that it's *clear* what happens when you do that).
Answer: The rules as written aren't entirely clear on this. These things are definite:

Mutagens are always inert if not in your possession, but your current
(newest) mutagen will be active again if you or another alchemist picks it up again. As the PRD alchemist page states, "a mutagen that is not in an alchemist's possession becomes inert until an alchemist picks it up again."
Mutagens you have created become inert if you create a new
mutagen. The PRD specifically says, "An alchemist can only maintain one dose of mutagen at a time." It doesn't matter if they're in your possession or not, either. Quoth the PRD, when an alchemist drinks another alchemist's mutagen, "if the other alchemist creates a different mutagen, the effects of the 'stolen' mutagen immediately cease."

The question is not whether you can pick and choose between mutagens in your possession -- you can't. Just by being created, a newer mutagen renders your older mutagens inert, so only one of your mutagens will ever be active at a time.
The question is whether a mutagen that was rendered inert because a newer one was made can become active again if the newer mutagen is expended.
Again, it's clear that a mutagen that becomes inert just because it left your possession can become active again. The fuzzy part is whether this "inert" is the same state as the "inert" that happens when your new mutagen supersedes your old mutagen(s).
Due to this lack of clarity, there are two GM rulings I would consider making:

You could rule that these are two different "inert" states. Mutagens
inactive because they left your possession can become active again (as the rules specify),
but mutagens inactive because a newer mutagen was created are dead
forever (because the rules don't specify that they can become active again). This is what we have done in the game I'm currently playing an alchemist in.
You could rule that mutagens that became inert because a newer mutagen was created can become active again too, if the newer mutagen is expended or destroyed. The mutagens become active in the order that they were created, newest to oldest.

The second option allows older mutagens to be saved, but forcing them to be used in newest to oldest order it prevents a slightly silly situation. Say you create 5 mutagens and keep them all in your possession. You'd have 4 inert extracts and 1 active mutagen, and you would not be able to pick and choose between them. Only the newest would be active. But then you put them all down so that they're all inert... if any of them can become active again, you can choose whichever one to pick up.
Comment: It does seem like with a second ruling the situation is even more silly: if you put them all down they all become inert, but only the most recent can become active on pickup - each one of the rest will still be inert while the newer exists.


Is it legal to include BSD licensed code within an MIT licensed project?

Question: If this is possible, how do I go about putting this in the license file or in the source files where the BSD licensed code was used?
Comment: Within the respective license terms, what makes you think it wouldn't be okay?
Comment: @GlenH7 - It doesn't seem like it would be "restricted" to not do this. I'm just not sure how to list the license as legally both licensees would have to be listed, but its not "dual license" as its actually different parts of the code have different liceneses
Comment: @durron597 - Dual license refers to a single code base allowing either license to be used which I believe is a separate issue.
Answer: Exhibit A: BSD license text
Exhibit B: MIT license text
First off, you really ought to read both of those licenses.  Really, go on now, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to read both.
What you should immediately notice is just how similar the two licenses are. Really, they are.  Basically, they both state "retain the copyright notice" and "retain the as-is / no warranty statement."
That's it.  That's really all there is to them.

So you asked:

Is it legal to include BSD licensed code within an MIT licensed project?

Well, why wouldn't it be legal?  You read the licenses, right?  There's nothing within either license restricting combining two projects together with those licenses.
To be more clear, yes, it's perfectly legal to combine Project A licensed with the MIT license along with Project B that is licensed with the BSD license.
You also asked:

If this is possible, how do I go about putting this in the license file or in the source files where the BSD licensed code was used?

The easiest way to do this is to keep each project in their own separate sub-folder within your overarching project that utilizes the two other projects.  From there, you can put a LICENSE.txt file in each sub-folder as appropriate.  Another bonus for using the sub-folder within the overarching project is that you can just copy things in verbatim from the original projects.  That makes it very clear what code is owned under what copyright and what license.
If, for whatever reason, you can't keep the projects isolated to their own sub-project folder, then you simply need to state that various portions are owned by different projects and licensed under X terms.

Copyright for portions of project Foo are held by [MIT original author, year] as part of project Bar and are provided under the MIT license.
  Copyright for additional portions of project Foo are held by [BSD original author, year] as part of project Baz and are provided under the BSD license.
  All other copyright for project Foo are held by [your name, year].

Note that the ordering of projects Bar and Baz is immaterial.
Also note how similar that is to my answer on your other question.
Also note that you don't really have to specify the license that each portion is provided under, but it certainly doesn't hurt.2
You need to have a section within your LICENSE.txt file that says Project Bar is provided under such-and-such license whereas Project Baz is provided under such-and-such license.2

Editorial note: The BSD and MIT licenses are called permissive licenses for a reason.  All they really say is A) "You can't exclusively claim this as your own" and B) "I'm not taking any liability for how you use the code I provided."
Once you understand the spirit behind the two licenses, it becomes much more clear on how to apply their terms.
1Note, we're using the 2-clause, not the 3-clause version of BSD as a) most everyone uses the 2-clause now and b) 3-clause just adds a bit more hassle with the "no endorsements" bit.
2This would appear to be a contradiction of statements, but it really isn't.  To be more clear - you don't have to specify the license when you identify the copyright ownership.  It's convenient, but not required.  Likewise, when you state the license for incorporated projects you don't have to state the copyright ownership at the same point.  It's just convenient to capture both aspects at the same time.


What's the best food for a picky 7 month old maltese

Question: My Maltese is very picky and is hard to please with food. I give him no table scraps and am feeding him natural balance as of now.
Answer: You have a couple of options. The one I would no personally choose, is to buy several brands of dog foods and put a little of each out a short distance apart. See which one he likes. This is a slippery road, though. My Grandmother used to keep multiple bags of dog food in the house and if the dog didn't immediately choke down her food, she said she didn't like that one anymore and switched her. That kind of thing costs a lot of money and leads to stomach trouble for the dog, though. Animals prefer a consistent diet. I'm not saying that they wouldn't prefer an occasional addition to their food, and most will always go after people food, but as far as their health and digestive system, they prefer a steady diet. It's why I don't feed mine anything but dog food and training treats. I think it's good that you're not feeding people food.
What I did personally is research and look up what the top quality foods are. I found a list somewhere, I can't remember where at this time, but an independent group had evaluate multiple pet foods and come up with an extensive list of excellent dog foods. Sufficed to say, but I didn't even recognize the names of the top 10. These people automatically disqualified any brand that had grains or meals added. Just whole meats and veggies. They also disqualified a lot because of recalls. They included subsidiary brands that tried to pretend they weren't part of the larger company that had a lot of recalls. I think "Taste of the Wild" fell into that category.
I actually found one of the brands on that top 100 list at a local store. I switched my dog to that and she seemed to like it pretty well. I blended the last of her old food with an increasing amount of her new food to switch her over without upsetting her stomach.
In the end, though, I don't pay much attention to what she wanted. While I'd like her to like her food, there really isn't as much option as you'd think. All you can do is look at the best pet food and get the highest level that you're willing to put he time/money into. Ideally, the best pet food is prepared people grade food, such as boiled or grilled chicken, fish, lean meats, steamed vegetables, etc... The problem there is you don't know if you're giving them all the nutrients and necessaries that they need to be healthy. You could prepare every mill by hand out of high quality ingredients and still make your pet sick or unhealthy because you're depriving them of something by not adding it to their diet. It's also time consuming, expensive, and labor intensive.
The next step down is to buy the raw foods, then down from that are the canned wet foods, and dry food is below that. I prefer dry food, because of ease of storage and usage. I buy the highest quality I can reasonably afford.
Whether you get something trashy, like Old Roy or prepare mills by hand, you're basically getting the best you can, so that really limits your options to 3-4 or less in your level of food. Of course you can then pick up a small bag of each of these and let your dog choose, if you want.
Other than that, I don't really believe that are dogs that are picky eaters. I know I'll probably get a down voter or comments on it, but I believe its almost exclusively projected on pets by owners. As an example to support my theory, I'll use my grandmother's dog. She was extremely snobbish about food. Even steak had to be cut up, cooled to the proper temperature, and left out for her convenience. She was stolen once and managed to get loose from the people, based on a later eye-witness account. She was loose for ~1 week. I burned through several tanks of gas searching for her. Turns out, the man that saw her escape from the thieves car fed her for a couple of days, then she was on her own for the rest of the week. When we got her back, for about a month afterwards, she'd eat anything you put down for her. Then my grandmother started babying her and switching her food around and she went back to her old ways.
We later inherited the dog. When we first got her, I'd put pieces of boiled chicken or some other healthy treat out for them. She'd turn her nose up and walk off. One of the other two immediately inhaled it. She came back 15min later and was looking for it to eat it. She pretty quickly learned to eat when she had the chance. She became much less picky from that point on. She got plenty to eat, but knew she needed to eat what she was given then and there or wait till next feeding. Between consistent diet and more exercise, she actually became much healthier.
So if it were me, I'd put the dogs food down for 15min twice a day. If she's still actively eating after 15min, let her continue, but if you put it down and she doesn't eat for 15min, then take it up and let her wait. Repeat at the end of the day. It won't take but a couple of days and she'll start eating. It may seem a little cruel, but it's actually healthier. You can control quantity, unlike with free feeding, and you also help regulate when they have to go to the bathroom and help prevent accidents in the house. Good luck and I hope you find a good dog food.
Answer: I have a Maltese and he wouldn't eat ANY Dog food at all until I found Purina Moist and Meaty. There are 3 kinds of that brand but Tucker will only eat the 2 that are tri- colored


How can I continue the quest in Bearclaw cave?

Question: I'm supposed to get the key from Bearclaw cave. I can see the quest marker on the floor, but there's no damn key anywhere to be found around it. I tried looking for the quest ID so I could reset it, but it's not documented anywhere I could see. Any fixes?
Comment: It should be "in the back room with the large chest. It's on the table to your left behind the small keg." unless it's glitched.
Comment: yep, I looked there. I can see the quest marker on the floor in the center of the room, but no key anywhere. If only they released the quest IDs, I could reset it :(
Comment: I had the same thing happen to me...I sometimes get a little trigger happy with my fireballs, and it blew the key over into the corner.
Answer: Not all quest marker mark the direct item. Some markers just mark the vicinity of the quest, where you have to find the item yourself.
As explained by the wiki:

The monastery entrance can be found by going across the top of the burial mound and down the steps. Once inside, either turn left or right: both passages will lead to the same location. Thorlogh will open a secret passage behind an old crypt that leads into a mixture of tower and Nordic ruins. After following the passage, a Necromancy Leader will exclaim at the visitors: Thorlogh will explain that they're under the command of Vernan. Fight through the various Necromancers until a large open area is reached: the Key is through the door on a pedestal, surrounded with loot.
Comment: Thanks, let me try this. I gave up on Faalskaar after that and even started a new game - in which I haven't yet gotten to this quest. Will try and post the results here.
Answer: I found it in the table to the far left, behind the mead keg.
It looked (to me) like an ordinary piece of gold, so I also overlooked it, instead using Unrelenting Force, Fireball and whatnot on the ground. Perhaps that's what's happening with you too. Sure, the quest maker DOES point to the rocks, but it's not there! Look where I directed you.
Happy playing! ;-)
Answer: It is on the table to the left as you enter the marked room. Look behind the keg
Comment: Thanks, I eventually finished this game about a year ago after restarting it


Engagement history data is stored in salesforce.com or not

Question: We have engagement history enabled and engagement history data is shown in salesforce.com against contacts. I have business requirement to do some processing on this engagement history data.
I want to know if data is stored in Pardot and it is shown in salesforce.com on the fly using lightning component or data is stored in salesforce.com objects itself. i queried task object but could not find activities listed under engagement history for contact.I appreciate help in this regard
Answer: The data shown in the Lightning Component "Engagement History" on the Contact object is actually stored in Pardot's database, not in SFDC.
To process the data, you might need to leverage the VisitorActivity Pardot API to get access to the records you are interested in.
Comment: thanks for your answer. we want to build our custom scoring model based on engagement history data. would it be best to dump all engagement history data from pardot in a custom sfdc object? actually we want to build the custom scoring model which has scoring in real time similar to what einstien scoring does with standard sfdc.
Comment: I guess you could, just be aware of storage usage


connecting gprs on window mobile and sending the data in C#

Question: hi i am really new to the mobile application so just a spoon feeder.but...... i am trying to develop an application where i can send my data to my website from my window mobile.this is my college project.i want to create a quotation base application where user can send a quotation to the website or the data base but could not able to find anything of relevance.can someone help me as i really have no idea how to do it.though have a good programming knowledge about asp.net.
Answer: If you know ASP.NET you have probably worked with Web Services. In Windows Mobile, using .NET Compact Framework, you can create a Web Service client much the same way as you do on other platforms, so I'd say that would be the easiest thing to try first.


The way to catch system clock interrupt in Python?

Question: I would like to ask is it possible to get the system clock interrupt in Python for each second, so that I do not need to constantly check the clock in loop?
Answer: If you want to go a bit more abstract, timing and event drive programming is what the Twisted python framework is about.
An example of a function acting every second would be:
from twisted.internet import task
from twisted.internet import reactor

def runEverySecond():
    print "a second has passed"

l = task.LoopingCall(runEverySecond)
l.start(1.0) # call every second

# l.stop() will stop the looping calls
reactor.run()

This code comes straight from one of the twisted task scheduling examples.
What is particularly cool about this framework is that its completely asleep (no CPU) between the times it wakes up (waking up from timers and events are all handled in the kernal via epoll() or select() not inside the python).
I've been using Twisted heavily for my Rasp Pi dev and I'm quite taken by its ability to handle complex event tasks with very little CPU.  Be warned thought that once you get beyond simple tasks it becomes complex fast (... though I would argue complex in a good way).
If you want very comprehensive (and fairly easy to follow) deep dive into it, look at krondo's Twisted Introduction
(BTW Twisted isn't a default framework on raspbian, you need to load it, and to do that you need the python C dev stuff loaded too, so a sudo apt-get install python-dev, sudo apt-get install build-essential followed by a pip install twisted (there is an apt-get for twisted too (python-twisted) but is really old, so I would recommend pip'ing it instead))
Answer: signal.settimer() seems like what you're looking for. please, tell us if for some reason this won't work for you, we'll dig deeper.
Comment: I think this might fit better as a comment, unless the OP tells us that he used that and that it worked. Seeing as it is a suggestion, and not a very in-depth answer.
Comment: @RPiAwesomeness a comment cannot be accepted as an answer
Comment: I know that. However, the way you worded this made me think that this would fit better as a comment. You could have commented it, and then, *if* the OP decided that this worked, created an answer. It's just my opinion though.


What is 'PermSize' in Java?

Question: I was going through the document in Java Memory Management and in that I came across PermSize which I couldn't understand. The document says that it stores, "JVM stores its metadata", but I couldn't exactly get what is meant by metadata. I was googling and somewhere I read it stores a value object (user defined object).
What kind of objects are stored there? An example with an explanation would be great.
Comment: Note that the Permanent Generation (and with it PermSize parameters) are going away in Java 8. They are replaced by the "Metaspace". See http://javaeesupportpatterns.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/java-8-from-permgen-to-metaspace.html
Comment: The default value is 64m for 64 bit VMs. We increased it to `512m` for a tomcat server running 8 rails apps. `-XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:PermSize=512m`. Tomcat with many class definitions itself needs a big PerSize and with ruby, ruby on rails combined with jruby ..need a huge PermSize.
Comment: @sleske BitDefender blocks that page, stating it contains malware.
Answer: A quick definition of the "permanent generation":

"The permanent generation is used to
  hold reflective data of the VM itself
  such as class objects and method
  objects. These reflective objects are
  allocated directly into the permanent
  generation, and it is sized
  independently from the other
  generations." [ref]

In other words, this is where class definitions go (and this explains why you may get the message OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space if an application loads a large number of classes and/or on redeployment).
Note that PermSize is additional to the -Xmx value set by the user on the JVM options. But MaxPermSize allows for the JVM to be able to grow the PermSize to the amount specified. Initially when the VM is loaded, the MaxPermSize will still be the default value (32mb for -client and 64mb for -server) but will not actually take up that amount until it is needed. On the other hand, if you were to set BOTH PermSize and MaxPermSize to 256mb, you would notice that the overall heap has increased by 256mb additional to the -Xmx setting.
Answer: This blog post gives a nice explanation and some background. Basically, the "permanent generation" (whose size is given by PermSize) is used to store things that the JVM has to allocate space for, but which will not (normally) be garbage-collected (hence "permanent") (+). That means for example loaded classes and static fields.
There is also a FAQ on garbage collection directly from Sun, which answers some questions about the permanent generation. Finally, here's a blog post with a lot of technical detail.
(+) Actually parts of the permanent generation will be GCed, e.g. class objects will be removed when a class is unloaded. But that was uncommon when the permanent generation was introduced into the JVM, hence the name.
Answer: The permament pool contains everything that is not your application data, but rather things required for the VM: typically it contains interned strings, the byte code of defined classes, but also other "not yours" pieces of data.
Answer: lace to store your loaded class definition and metadata. If a large code-base project is loaded, the insufficient Perm Gen size will cause the popular Java.Lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen.

What is 'PermSize' in Java?