Ford Nucleon: Back to the future?

September 10, 2006 6:00 AM PDT

With so much attention focused on alternative energy these days, non-fossil fuel proposals for cars have run a wide gamut. Even the once-verboten subject of a nuclear-powered automobile has arisen with increasing frequency.

Usually absent from these discussions, however, is the history of designs for such vehicles that came off drawing boards in Detroit throughout the 1950s at the height of the Atomic Age. This post on Damn Interesting, for example, reminds us that such models as the Ford Nucleon were once seriously considered as the automobiles of the future.

In retrospect, perhaps Ford's ideas weren't so far-fetched after all.

Posted by Mike Yamamoto

Man gets 7 years for software piracy

The owner of one of the nation's largest software piracy Web sites has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison--the longest sentence ever handed down for software piracy.

Nathan Peterson, 27, of Los Angeles, sold copyrighted software at a huge discount on his site, iBackups.net, prosecutors said. The FBI began investigating the site in 2003 and shut it down in February 2005.

U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III on Friday ordered Peterson to pay restitution of more than $5.4 million. Peterson pleaded guilty in December in Alexandria, Va., to two counts of copyright infringement for illegally copying and selling more than $20 million in software.

Justice Department and industry officials called the case one of the largest involving Internet software piracy ever prosecuted.

Last month, Ellis sentenced Danny Ferrer, a Florida man who pleaded guilty to copyright charges in connection with multimillion-dollar sales of pirated software, to six years in prison.

Software piracy resulted in a loss of $34 billion worldwide in 2005, a $1.6 billion increase over 2004, according to a study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance