261–270 of 460 posts
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Some prison rules are written in blood. Most prison rules are written in bureaucracy and profit motive. No prison escape movie ever ended with the guard preventing future escapes by instituting a new "no sleeveless shirts when visiting an inmate" rule.
Forgive my ignorance, but how do sleeveless shirts help facilitate an escape?
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Hell I had a buddy in high school that went through and wrote a custom program that's only function was to perfectly 'emulate' the entire calculators menu system, so that when asked to demonstrate that he had no notes or programs, he could go through the entire process of showing nothing being archived and then wiping the memory. Dude wound up in the Stanford CS program after high school, so clearly he learned someth…
I wonder how many individual variations on this specific functionality have existed or currently exist on TI calculators in the wild. It's common enough that I see it mentioned every time TI calculators are brought up. When I got my TI-85 (one of the earliest ones), I was one of two kids (the other kid had some $500 HP monstrosity) who had a full-on graphing calculator so "clearing the memory" wasn't even on the teac…
This wasn't really necessary, as I had enough time remaining to redo the whole test without the programs, and then a third run without the calculator.
This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…
This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added. As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don't want to deal with people having internet access and notes. Now if Apple/Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn't easily break…
The only way to have a way for OEMs to provide a proctor mode in the context of the test is to take away your personal freedom to use your device in all contexts. The cure is vastly worse than the disease. It would on the other hand be trivial to provide a device owned by the school that Only runs calculator software without admin access. It would also probably cost at least a $100 per unit and be less familiar to st…
They thought of those things and implemented a good system.
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There was the little known, but powerful combo called "GROUP" and "ARCHIVE". GROUP allowed you to package together a set of programs. Archive would allow you to take that group and store it in the long term memory of the calculator. You can then "clear the memory" of the calculator, but can then immediately unarchive the grouped programs and get everything back how it was. That said, I don't recall my teachers ever g…
Back in Algebra 1 my teacher had a policy that you were allowed to use any program that you wrote yourself. More teachers should do that, though it'd get challenging to enforce if it weren't just the one or two nerdy kids taking you up on it.
I think the bigger "loophole" is the ability to quickly solve simultaneous and and quadratic equations very easily using built-in functions on the calculators. This saves real time on tests like the SAT, because all you have to do is reorganize the equation to be in the right order, then tap in the coefficients to get the answer.
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Back in Algebra 1 my teacher had a policy that you were allowed to use any program that you wrote yourself. More teachers should do that, though it'd get challenging to enforce if it weren't just the one or two nerdy kids taking you up on it.
I remember writing programs for my TI-85, and I learned those formulas better than if I'd just memorized them for the test. I don't think our teachers had any rules about this stuff, and they probably didn't even know it was possible. I think the bigger "loophole" is the ability to quickly solve simultaneous and and quadratic equations very easily using built-in functions on the calculators. This saves real time on t…
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I mean you could store some dumbly ciphered information on a sheet too, but I guess it's not as convenient
A microcontroller with a decent CPU (a Zilog Z80 in this case) could, given enough time, run some serious AES-256 encryption. The storage is minimal but it could be good enough. Of course, you could always use a paper one-time pad, and if you can get the pad distributed without interception, there's no way they can ever break that.
I still have and use my TI-84+ that I purchased when I started college. As a professional I use it here and there but rarely for anything that actually needs more than a basic scientific calculator. During college (civil engineering) I used many of the more powerful functions like matrix math stuff. In high school, I don't think I used a graphing calculator once. Just doesn't seem necessary to teach geometry and alge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some prison rules are written in blood. Most prison rules are written in bureaucracy and profit motive. No prison escape movie ever ended with the guard preventing future escapes by instituting a new "no sleeveless shirts when visiting an inmate" rule.
Forgive my ignorance, but how do sleeveless shirts help facilitate an escape?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In prison, only non-programmable calculators were allowed. A friend somehow had gotten a TI-85 in. I programmed it to say "NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR" as its startup message, so they wouldn't take it during a random search. I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.
What'd they get you for?