I mean the work that's way, way past overdue. I mean the "Let's fix the bridges and levies the civil engineers have been screaming about" work. I mean the "let's bring electricity to rural America" work. I mean the "Let's build an interstate highway system" work.

Have you seen public schools in America? There are two elementary schoold within a ten-minute drive of my place. Both of them have leaks in their roof. They actually had to cancel classes twice this week when the main line to the school flooded the place. My fire department has been complaining for years they can't cover their area of responsibility without more men, and sure enough, a house about two miles from here just burned to the ground waiting for the trucks to arrive. We had a very suspicious police shooting in my city last year, and the cops all came out crying that they don't have enough men to handle potentially dangerous situations.

There's an overpass in my city that's been condemned. Politics got the condemnation lifted so traffic is flowing again, but everyone knows it's not IF, it's WHEN, it falls. When it goes, it's going to take a bunch of office buildings with it. Everyone I know avoids that route.

These are all problems I see first-hand in my city, but I'll bet it's the same story elsewhere. Forget makework. We've got enough real problems to keep an army busy for years.

• Not falling down fast enough after being struck or tasered.
• Being pushed by an officer into another officer.
• Placing or tapping your index finger ever so gently on the officer's shoulder.
• Cursing at the officer so that the officer's feelings are hurt.
• Having an epileptic seizure or heart attack during arrest.
• Not bending like a blade of grass when the officer attempts to wrap your limbs into a pretzel shape.
• Not knowing the language or not understanding the officers commands.
• Failing to produce a state issued ID card.
• Uttering the phrase "I won't answer your questions; I want to speak to a lawyer".

I wouldn't say AS is a roach motel of a book. The story is pretty good, and you don't have to buy into her entire philosophy to get some positive take aways from the book (don't mooch off other peoples hard work, work hard yourself, be responsible for yourself, stick to your ideals and don't sell out etc...).

That said, her dialog is lacking at times and she can get quite wordy. Some of the monologues in the book are so extremely long that I wonder if her editor actually edited anything.

I found The Fountainhead to be a much better story though and while it still had dialog issues, she did much less beating you over the head with the long monologues about her personal philosophy.

The TI-89 runs for weeks/months on a set of AAAs, boots quickly, and has a bunch of nice hardware keys that make it perfect for entering math problems.

Yes, it's too expensive. But it's a darn useful device.