Wow, pretty cool to be on Slashdot (I work for The Open Planning Project).

With regards to open source, we try to tackle the problem from all sides. We try to create free and open standards for data, we lobby for said standards in government usage of data, and we try to supply the best of breed open source software that uses that data.

For the most part, the various governments aren't competing with each other for software, so open source makes tons of sense. In addition, the software support business model works very well for governments, because they want to keep this going, and most proprietary shops get bored with supporting a single large customer.

With regards to urban planning, our original plan was just to open up the urban planning data and see where that got us, but we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at other cities that have already have better urban planning. Amsterdam, Paris, Bogota. Jan Gehl (one of the great moving forces behind better urban planning) basically said that since you can never satisfy all desire for cars (which make up a minority of the population anyway) it's better to scale back just a tiny bit the attention spent on cars and instead concentrate on the people. Since cars take up so much space, scaling back on cars just a small amount opens up huge possibilities for people.

And also, working for TOPP is great! We do cool things, work on open source, support great causes, and the parties are kick-ass too!

If that's what you're waiting for, than you might want to have a look at this article about http://www.usaspending.gov/... It's an eye opener...

I'm surprised that no has yet mentioned Robert Sedgewick's "Algorithms in %s" % lang series (where lang in ['c', 'c++', 'java']). It's truly the best algorithms/data structures book I've come across. (Though personally, I wish he had a Python version)