Just to be clear:

"... in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago..."
should be
"... in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost FIVE decades ago..."

Not that that makes it better.

Semi-valid is actually invalid. Come on, now. Break it or accept it.

As a design process, evolution is an undirected search over a design space, using an extremely weak filter of "does not die" to refine the design.

Popularity aside, it's not a serious answer to human origin. It could sort of past muster when cells were thought to be blobs of simple chemicals, but we now know they are complex nano-factories running off of digital blueprints.

Junk DNA has turned out to be nothing of the sort, and I believe "non-coding DNA" is related to control logic and error checking. And that's before we even start to look at symbiosis and ecosystems.

How many retards does it take to equal a single intelligent designer? How many monkeys randomly hitting buttons and clicking "Compile" will replicate your work as a SW engineer?

Bearing in mind that failure is an option, there being no finite number is a very real possibility.

The supposed natural origins of complex designs aren't anywhere close to being explanations. So we're left with the one known good explanation of design - intelligent design; one that was historically believed in, and consistent with any computer engineer's experience with information systems.

No, I do not. I don't have to know anything about the designer of man, to recognize that something like a computer or a car is a designed object, and that those were designed by man.

Extrapolating that true relationship to conclude that man too is a designed object is rational. Incomplete, perhaps, but working with incomplete information should not be anything new to an engineer. ("So you want me to buid you a widget but you don't know what you want ...")

Nothing about my argument says that every designer must have his own designer. It merely points out that man did not design himself and that man isn't even capable of designing himself; therefore this is evidence for the existence of a superior being that designed man.

And no, it's not the one acceptable argument for god. It's the one that I like, though, and one that every techie should acknowledge. To deny it is like denying the existence of lolcats and porn on the Interwebz.

Certain size, moving at certain speeds, emitting certain radiowaves...

When you add electronic elements to your detection scheme, a lot of those false positives (like from birds) fall off the radar... pun not intended but certainly appreciated.

So program the system to target fast-moving, airborne signal points.

Not hard stuff.

/sigh. Knowing our previous discussion, I don't believe you. There's too much history of people thinking and arguing on the topic for you to have not found a single rational argument, if that's all you were looking for.

But I said I would offer one, and so here's one from a systems engineering point of view.

I work with computer systems and building up software/hardware to collect information, process it, and pass it around. I can recognize the complexity of a system, and the level of effort needed to build complex systems versus simple ones. There's an obvious difference in wht it takes to rendering realistic 3D graphics versus displaying the simple text "Hello World!", for example

As such, I can recognize that the human body far exceeds the functionality of any human built system in history. There are an estimated 37.2 trillion cells in your body, all working together to make you continue to live. Those trillions of cells are grouped into a dozen or so systems throughout your body. Those parts working together using many nested layers of feedback loops. All of that starts from a single cell, working from its DNA blueprint.

That's an amazing design, and we don't even understand it enough to replicate it, let alone build something better.

The fact that the human body operates from an amazing intricate design is evidence for a superhuman designer. That is, a being that is above humans in ability to create designs.

Again, you folks act like RF energy cannot be controlled, it just goes off in all directions no matter what you do and that there is no way to isolate the jamming energy to small areas. This is not true. Would there be some residual affect outside the intended area? Perhaps, but if you do this right it would not be wide spread, nor would it need to extend more than a few hundred feet beyond the desired areas....

Tell me it's not possible to limit where you put the RF and control the signal strength outside the desired area to acceptable levels... I think you can do that, if you are careful and think about where you put the jammers, what antennas you use and what direction you point them.

Also, GPS jammers are neither expensive nor rare. They are off the shelf and have been for decades and well with the budget of the Secret Service (In fact I'd bet they ALREADY have a few). Directional antennas are also inexpensive and off the shelf, even at the frequencies of GPS. None of this is rocket science... Just a bit of engineering.

No, they extend as high as you can manage w/o making them obvious. The purpose is to entangle, snare or disrupt the drone in flight by providing obstacles that the distant pilot cannot observe and don't expect. Of course you *could* just build a structure over the whole thing.... But my working assumption is they don't want to change the ascetics of the thing.

Yes, it is illegal for you and I, but the government *can* legally do it anytime and any place it wants.

My primary idea is to use nets similar to the way birds are sometimes captured for scientific study. Tie a couple of bean bags to a net, fire it out of a cannon making sure it's rotating. Rotation spreads out the net, snares the drone and the weight of the bean bags disrupts it's flight. There are a couple of variations on this you could try, even a shot gun might be effective but pretty safe to bystanders if the drone is low enough and close enough to the shooter.

We went to the moon because we were in a (cold) war with the Soviet Union at the time.

We started to the moon because JFK needed a spectacular - but once the cost estimates started coming in, he started seriously considering backing off. We went to the moon because JFK took a bullet to the head allowing LBJ to push it (and the associated pork) as a monument to JFK.
 

Once the Soviets cancelled their moon missions, so did we

Apollo was essentially cancelled in the budget battles of '65-'67. The Soviets didn't get serious about their lunar programs until around '66-'67. (And most of them weren't cancelled until '72 or so.)

OK.... I'm a bit behind the times in regards to mortars. I knew they had the ability to return fire based on RADAR tracking back to the source, but I didn't know about this... Which explains some of the interesting bumps and equipment sitting on top of the White House I've seen lately...

I disagree. Both the pilot and the aircraft will be emitting in most cases, but even if it's just the pilot, that signal will be a "new" one, which pops up in an area that is of interest, as it will have a line of sight access to the areas being protected. It's not hard to detect that a signal is new, plus it is not hard to locate where a signal source is if you have multiple receivers and just a little bit of technology behind them. A new signal in a predetermined area, especially one with enough strength to be used to pilot a drone into undesired areas should be enough to get you looked at closely in a short time. You won't be lost in a sea of similar RF signals as some here seem to think.

Yea, but a cell phone signal flying over the south lawn is a pretty clear indicator that you have an issue, and if you have data connection with any kind of usable latency, that drone is going to be practically glowing with RF energy, which is 1960's technology detectable.... Everybody seems to think we somehow have a problem coming up with a location of a signal source, when it's EASY to set up multiple receivers and generate a really good idea where that source is in a very short time. And if you limit the coverage of your receivers by using directional antennas, you can easily winnow out all the sources outside the area you are interested in so you don't ever listen to them.

No need for guns; just station a half-dozen guard birds on the roof.

Did you miss the part where I said we'd jam GPS in the general area of the lawn? Really, you just provide false signals and you can pretty much deflect the drone on GPS autopilot away from it's intended target. Easy to do, off the shelf hardware exists.

I was thinking about nets tied to bean bags launched so they spin myself...

But, YOUR signal would be coming late to the party and if I have a system that eliminates commonly monitored signals, locates them using multiple receivers and weeds out the sources that are not in areas where a drone pilot might want to stand/sit/hide. Then if you eliminate all the signals that are simply not strong enough to be useable by a drone flying over the distant lawn I'm trying to protect, there isn't much left to look at but your signal.