Just a quick look at the pictures of the aircraft you linked showed no similarity with the Spitfire, other than the Supermarine name. S4 is a floatplane with a mid-wing, S5 is a floatplane with a low wing, and the 224 has fixed landing gear and gull wings.

Almost all early war fighters "shared ancestry" with racing aircraft from the 20s and 30s, but that's because where the aircraft development was going on at the time. World War I was over, budgets were cut, and with the technical limitations and rapid development of the time, there was significant overlap between civilian and military aviation. But that doesn't mean the Spitfire was a race plane any more than the B-17 was a passenger liner.

My God, Slashdot has gone to shit over the years. That kind of unresearched clickbait nonsense would not have made a post 10 years ago.

The aircraft in the picture is:

1. Too small.
2. Unarmed.
3. Unarmored.

Let's explain:

Once you add armament and armor, the Bugatti would be a LOT slower. Probably slower than the Bf-109 that set the 469mph record.

To compensate, you'd need a bigger engine. The 109, which was a small fighter to begin with (half the size of a P-51 and a third the size of a P-47), was already running a big engine for its size and barely had enough room to upgrade to the DB605 during the middle of the war. This Bugatti is tiny. It's powered by two 4.9L engines that produce 450hp each. In 1940, the 109 had the DB601 with a displacement of 34L and produced ~1200hp. By 1945, the DB605 was up to 37L and produced about 1800hp.

The Bugatti wouldn't be big enough to run an engine that big, and while I'm sure one of you is going to ask "but it doesn't need to"... yes it does. If it's to carry enough fuel, armaments, and ammunition, it needs to have an engine that can propel it forward at combat speeds with all that extra weight, and an airframe that can hold all that. You don't get a lunar lander to the moon in Kerbal Space Program with a pair of solid fuel boosters, and you don't get an armed and armored fighter to loiter over Britain for an hour with two 4.9L engines. Not happening. Physics disagrees.

Incidentally, the 109's already small size was one of the major problems for the Germans during the Battle of Britain. It didn't have the fuel capacity to stay over London for anything more than 15-20 minutes and still be able to return to France.

"Duh".

I don't mean to sound too flippant about this, but isn't this around the time in the movie that a Morgan Freeman type of character says "People were not meant to play at god!"?

Why would someone do this? I presume it's to give the defense time to prepare a better case or review evidence?

I'm afraid you're exactly right.

When you start globalizing and opening yourself up to competition with countries that have no labour or environmental laws to speak of, you by default undercut your own industries to the point where they are not competitive.

Free trade with developing countries is a horrendously bad idea for this reason. Tarriffs can be a mitigating factor - to a point, of course.

1. Slashdot nerds don't go to parties.
2. Slashdot nerds who voted "Libertarian" better either be filthy rich or built like brick shithouses, because scrawny, poor nerds in dead-end jobs are going to get their asses kicked in libertarian paradise.

I have only flown through Seattle and never really spent more than about 6 hours in the city proper (outside the airport), yet I was creeped out by their police as early as 2000 - long before the stories of abuse came out. Here's why:

I'm coming off my flight in Seattle for the first time and waiting for another, when all of a sudden, interrupting the normal announcements, the speakers across the airport are blaring out "DO NOT WORRY, CITIZENS! THE POLICE AND FIRE DEPARTMENTS ARE HERE TO ASSIST YOU." This was over a year before 9/11 so it never occurred to me that some sort of terrorist attack had happened, and as far as I knew, the police in Seattle had done nothing notable to rile up the citizenry. Yet the fact that they felt the need to reassure me every 10 minutes (for 3 hours...) that they're here to help me was the weirdest thing ever.

That is all.

You do realize that the rate of penile cancer among men is almost zero, period?

Penile cancer is incredibly rare and linked to an infection that results from bad hygiene.

You're just adding to my point about uneducated voters =/

This isn't a left vs right pissing match. This is an example of how a great mass of uninformed voters shot themselves in their collective foot by freezing property taxes until the property has been sold.

Unfortunately it's not so much a matter of the ID itself as the onerous conditions that the Republican party wants to put on getting voter ID. Poor people don't always have a residence they've been at for a year along with three bills and other forms of ID.

Great point.

I was thinking something along the lines of the disaster that is the California proposition system (yay, no more tax hikes! that worked out great...), but I think you hit the spot better.

Is the biggest problem truly voter identification, rather than voter education?

On another note, once people don't have leaders to blame, will we see increased societal polarization? Right now, hippie liberal wiener in Boston isn't blamed for abortion laws, just as frothing at the mouth nutjob conservative in New Mexico isn't blamed for gun laws. What sort of societal conflict would we see if neighbours, or at least neighbouring states, disagree on divisive issues?