It really doesn't need to since you aren't bound to a fixed schema. Just use whatever fields are necessary for your documents and map them to the appropriate types.
Interesting, but it's not as if hotels in general have been high security installations.
Very easy experiment: Just go to the front desk an thell them that you sadly seem to have lost your room card. 90% of the time they will just ask for your room number without requiring any kind of proof that it's actually your room.
Or there's those hotels where you have to leave the keys at the front desk. Each time you come back you say your room number and they give you the key.
Yeah, that was our hostel in NYC. I asked about that, and they kind of looked at me funny, as if I was paranoid or something. If figured the best way would be to semi-jokingly show her my ID regardless and be friendly and chatty in the hopes she'd remember my face with the room number.
In hindsight I might have tried asking for a different room number's key to see if she was paying attention and then quickly correct myself "No, just kidding, my room's 208 not 210. I just wanted to see if you'd give people any room key they ask for". Maybe that would've made them see the issue.
Instead, I took the easy route and made sure to never leave my netbook, passport, tickets, etc in the room (all the rest was replaceable and we were travelling light).
I would have probably done differently if I wasn't in a foreign country on a different continent and still getting used to the cultural uncanny valley of NYC being "almost, but not quite like Europe", so I opted for the safe choice of not being a bother to these obviously hard-working people.
This incident also sheds a different light on another tidbit on talk show history.
In one of the earlier episodes of the 5by5 version Dan and John were talking about how Dan's recommendation of "Silent Running" to John basically ended the first run of the talk show. At the time I thought that was just a joke. But after this I'm really wondering if that supposed friendship between the two wasn't all that strong after all.
I would imagine that it would be quite difficult to design a 3D printer that works in zero gravity. All current designs that I'm aware of rely on gravity to either keep the base material on a level surface (e.g. SLS, SLM) or to draw the build material down from a nozzle of some sort (e.g. FDM)
Everyone forgets about 3D printing's older brother, 3D milling. Start with a big block of aluminum (or any metal softer than the cutting bit), use what amounts to a CNC dremel tool to carve away everything you don't want. It is vastly simpler than 3D printing and creates objects that are much more sturdy. But it is slower and uses a more expensive feedstock than printing.
Good match for space fabrication, too. Zero-g makes it much easier for an air nozzle to dislodge debris. Feed it big ingots of metal straight from the asteroid smelters. Not sure if you could do the milling in a vacuum, but it would be worth a shot. Downside, greatly limits cooling. Upside, easier recovery/purification/recycling of shavings. A big electrostatic charge on the ingot and tools should make the shavings literally fly off of the work to a collection plate.
Do you mean having a blob of molten metal floating in a chamber? Surface tension means it won't keep a shape. (I guess you could make cheap ball bearings.) If you get around that, any time you touch the blob it would start rippling and ripples won't really damp out. Might make for some pretty sculpture if you can flash freeze it, but nothing of industrial value.
Unless you are trying to obliquely refer to casting, which should be pretty much identical with or without gravity/air. And still needs tooling to make the molds.
(And please don't say that the molten metal could be a feedstock for a printer. That would be a circular discussion.)
I guess you meant something more like blacksmithing. Chamber could add heat by microwave induction. No air to oxidize the surface so you might be able to work trickier metals. We already have power hammers, we already have 6DOF manipulation tables. I'm not entirely convinced that a power hammer could do the work accurately enough, might want to use a milling machine for the final fitting.
Repraps print fine on a vertical surface, or upside down. The inter-layer adhesion is achieved by melting the new layer into the previous one, and the build material is pushed down with positive pressure. It would work fine in zero gravity, though cooling might be a problem if it were working in a vacuum.
I and several of my clients use quite a few of those and I'm very happy with the performance. IO performance is very good (especially for a virtualized system) for example apt-get update / upgrade takes less time on one of those than it does on a dedicated root server of mine (Core i7 Quad, 8 GB Ram, 7.2 kRPM SATA).
As long as the package you need doesn't include a C extension (which most don't) you can just ship it with your code (license permitting ofc.) - just add the path to the libary to sys.path. It's not a very clean solution but can be a real life saver when you have to work on "broken" systems.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. This is a system I log into every day, and I don't want to maintain my own install of Python and related packages on it. It's too much overhead. I'd rather just use the default Python, even though it's old.
Because it leads to namespace pollution and hard-to-track-down bugs.
It's especially bad in this case where adding an executable in the system can suddenly shadow any built-in name (e.g. imagine someone adds a "print" or "sys" executable).
Refactoring is also made much harder with import * if you have cascading modules. I have a pylint hook forbidding these before committing to our hg repo
