I personally think that the existence of high-powered fully-automatic assault weapons with large magazines have no place in the hands of the general population in any society that would call itself civilized. I would go further though, I would argue that firearms of any type do not have a place in society.
Who knows, perhaps the US will start to think a little differently about its huge arsenal of weapons in public hands now that so many children have paid with their lives?
unrestricted migration between members of the Union as causing breakdowns in social provisioning
Funny how people don't concern themselves with unrestricted migration within their own country, as if some accident of geography and history ought to make any difference. Immigration controls; The last bastion of institutionalised racism.
Also, we would be underestimating the enemy - a fatal mistake - to describe racists as 'stupid'. It's not stupid, it's wrong, mean-spirited, indefensible, but to suggest that only stupid people can be racist is false.
People who work to get immigrants out of the country, or to prevent them coming in in the first place, are working from manifestly false assumptions. This does not make them stupid, it just makes them dependant (as we all are to some extent) upon their assumptions. What they fail to understand is this; We are all immigrants.
All that said; RIP Patrick Moore. I would think that we should keep his political views separate from his impressive achievements as a populariser of science - they are not related and his contributions to the popular understanding of astronomy will be greatly missed.
do you think they would recommend standing in a door way or under a table? Or would they recommend placing the bed near a large open window for a quick exit?
Neither. They would say "get out of your house and don't go back".
Well I had written a long reply, but I just deleted it because I've pretty much given up. Here's the thing, those scientists should not be in jail because they didn't kill anyone, and there's no evidence at all that any lives would have been saved if they'd said something different.
And I am right about the housing. And so are you, since you said "If your house is not built well, outside your house becomes the safest place for you." - which is 100% correct but only if you stay out of the house and never go back. Then you're safe. The moment you step into that house, you become not safe again.
Also, maybe a large earthquake was less likely. This is hardly inconsistent with a large earthquake happening, is it?
I recall a family that survived a brick house's collapse in '87 because they ran out during a 6.1 quake.
That's great for them, assuming they exist. It doesn't change the facts. Sure, if you happen to be right by the door that's great, but most of the time you're not. In fact, alot of the time you spend in your house (assuming you work elsewhere) is spent in bed. Good luck getting out of your bed, out of your house and into the relative safety of the street - even assuming that the street is wide enough to avoid falling masonry from the buildings on both sides.
I happen to live in a very seismically active area, and have experienced many earthquakes. Outside of your house, things fall down (chimneys, roof tiles, walls), holes filled with wet sand open up in the ground. If your house is built well, inside it is the safest place. If your house is not built well, you are fucked.
But the point here is that I cannot see how blaming the scientists for the deaths is remotely fair, since the implication is that had the advice been different lives would have been saved, and further that the effect of different advice could reasonably have been foreseen. I don't think either of those statements are true. I think people died simply because they were living in unsafe buildings in a seismic zone.
Are you suggesting that the resident who was 'predicting' the earthquakes was right? Not in the sense of being accidentally correct (wasn't he out by 100km or something anyway), but in the sense of actually having a reliable earthquake prediction method?
In any case, it seems to me that actually having a 'earthquake risk assessment panel' is an error, since earthquake risk cannot be assessed in any meaningful way - beyond that fact that you live near a fault line and in an unreinforced masonry building and therefore when there's a big quake there's a good chance that you will die. Why was this panel set up in the first place? What was its mandate? Who is responsible for the sub-standard housing being still lived in?
Let me ask you this - what should the risk assessment panel's advice been, and how would things have worked out differently?
Because it's true. When has running out into the street during a large earthquake - of the type that causes buildings to fall down - helped? And I don't mean those stories about how everyone in the village would run into the square whenever there was a tremor. Those are examples of it helping when there wasn't a large earthquake.
How about ways to mitigate the risk in the event of an earthquake?
Like building houses that don't fall down, for instance?
I'm not sure what you're getting at in your last paragraph, but I don't see how anyone can be at fault except those who allow the populace to live in dangerous housing in an earthquake zone. You suggest that the scientists on the panel should have, I don't know, told everyone that an earthquake was imminent? Which, in all likelihood of course, it wasn't. If they had suggested there was danger, do you suppose everyone would have left their houses and stayed in the town square for a while? And then, if nothing happened, they move back? And then what if there was a big one, do you send the scientists to jail for getting the wrong day?
The residents had a regular routine of leaving their houses and going to safer ground and sleeping in their cars when small earthquakes had hit.
Which is a pointless exercise. A large earthquake can hit at any time, with or without prior 'smaller' shakes. The only way these people would have been safe is if they had spent their entire lives sleeping in their cars. And the real reason so many people died is nothing to do with a lack of earthquake prediction, which is impossible, but because they were all living in unreinforced sub-standard earthquake-prone ancient buildings. The people that built those, or allowed people to continue living in them, or issued building consents for them, or however it works in Italy, are the ones culpable.
There seems to be a general notion here that 'running into the street' is a good plan when you're living in a big old stone building and you get an earthquake. This is false - when a bit earthquake hits you have literally seconds to get clear, and you're not going to make it. Dive under a table, stand in a doorway, and hope. The best advice if you live in a seismic zone is to live in safe housing. Nice wooden single-story houses do not fall down in earthquakes. I'd suggest living in those.
Yes that's right. Because when someone, through their actions causes such distress to an individual that they eventually take their own life, there should be no means of recourse. Because if none of those actions actually touched the person, and so were not covered by common assault, then they're all perfectly legal.
The problem with people like you, is that you think offense - in the context of a law such as the one under discussion - means to get a bit annoyed. This is manifestly not the case, any more than then term 'menace' means to growl at someone a bit, or 'harass' means to point at someone once in the street. The type of effects that laws such as this are intended to control, are using public communications networks to mount sustained, personal, and extremely damaging attacks on individuals in a way that causes very significant distress.
I'm curious as to why you'd think that people who indulge in such activities shouldn't face punishment? Simply because it's speech? As though in some way speech weren't (in the words of some slashdot poster years ago) "a real action in the world, with real consequences". If one abuses one's free speech right just to grossly insult and harass other individuals - as very often happens on the internet it seems - then I don't personally have a much a problem with punishing those people.
Well that's all great and everything, but I'm really curious about what your proposed alternative is? I hear calls for 'small government' all the time, but I wonder what you would replace all the functions of 'big government' with?
For instance, who would fix the roads? Private road companies, I presume, who would charge you to use their roads? Schools would be what? Community-run, so that they teach only what the local community happens to think. Grow up in (please, no geographical corrections!) the bible belt and expect to hear nothing about Evolution during your education.
Yes, every government has eventually fallen. Except for the ones that haven't, but of course they just haven't fallen yet. And thus your prediction is always true.
Your notion that home-schooling is remotely even a possibility for 90% of the population is a bit strange too, unless I'm mis-understanding your suggestions. It's a bit like suggesting that everyone should learn to maintain their own car, and that the garage down the street is an instrument of oppression.
You talked a little earlier (or later, I've been scrolling around alot) about your school experiences not being happy ones. I'm sorry to hear that, my experience was different. I had good teachers, and once I found which things I was actually interested in I learned alot. University was even better. My experience of the education system here in New Zealand, now that I have three young children in Primary School, is that the teachers are universally motivated, passionate, hard-working and that I'd damn glad to get the kids out of the house every day.
Well that's a relief. Sorry if I took your example literally.
I take your point about keyboards, but on the other hand they do rather take up valuable device real-estate. I'll take the big screen over the keyboard personally, but typing on it is more or less impossible.
I would welcome targeted advertising if it was even close to the things I am interested in
But that's the thing with advertising. The more targeted it is, the less you actually need it. Because if you really want the things in the advert, then you would have already researched the options, and probably decided what you were going to buy. Advertising is, more or less, completely useless. How many things have you ever bought because you saw them in an advert?
Advertising works by creating demand. The most effective advertising campaigns in history have always worked by making people think that they need things that they didn't really need. Engagement rings, for example, were the product of an advertising campaign. In my not especially humble opinion, the world would be a better place without advertising of any kind.
This is what they use in London. They work on trains and buses, and work reliably and efficiently. They seem to work in exactly the way you suggest, as not 100% bulletproof security but only good enough.
I think the balance is stored on the card, but all transactions are sent through to a central authority, which would certainly be able to detect any fraud and disable cards found to be behaving suspiciously. Or, more likely, have the ubiquitous CCTC cameras in London identify those using fraudulent cards and presumably punish them appropriately.
If you refuse, they can hold you as you are on their property,
Really? They can hold you? Wouldn't that be unlawful imprisonment, or something equally illegal. I'm pretty sure they can't even take your camera off you, or compel you to delete the photos. They can certainly chuck you out, but I'm almost certain that's all
Of course for most works of art, photos are available online. So all you have to do is a web search.
By the way, as an aside, I was in the Chicago Art Institute last year and everyone was taking photos. In my opinion this harmed the quality of the experience of looking at the art (which was to the photos as a man is to his shadow).
I seem to remember, sometime around the original iPhone rumours were flying around, that the notion of a phone with only one button was pretty much unheard of.
At the time, no-one could imagine how one might unlock such a phone, since every single phone (bar none) required a two-button sequence within a short period of time to unlock.
When the iphone came out, and people saw the swipe-to-unlock feature, people were pretty impressed. "That's clever", they said. And they were right, it was clever.
Now I'm not saying that it should be patanteble necessarily, although if I'd patented it I'd be pretty pissed off if Apple (or anyone) pinched the idea from me, but I really don't think you can argue that it wasn't an innovation.
OK, it's got a stupid name. But they seem to refer to themselves as D* in blog posts etc, which I suppose might work.
In any case I don't think there's any doubt now that Facebook will implode at some point. Maybe Anonymous will break into their datacenters somehow and obliterate all their data - imagine that! So given that at some point people will be looking for something new, is there any reason why a few Diaspora nodes might pop up and start to be used. I've not used it myself, since I personally have to give social networks a miss for the same reasons that reformed alcoholics should never drink again, but if it's online somewhere why wouldn't they?
I mean this site looks perfectly fine. Does it matter that it's decentralised, as long as the experience of it is fairly seamless? Especially given that I don't remember facebook being all that reliable anyway. As someone else has pointed out, email started out as closely guarded proprietary systems, and evolved into the distributed system we have today. It has its problems, spam being chief amongst them, but these I'm sure could have been engineered out when true email was designed. Of course, it's far too late for that now, but that doesn't mean that a distributed social network is nothing more than a nerd fantasy.
From a more idealistic point of view - and as a wise man once said to me, 'what's wrong with having ideals?' - isn't a free distributed social network that no-one actually owns just generally a better thing?
Yes that's true. One can't blame apple for creating the broken system. One can, however, condemn apple for participating aggressively in patent wars and - for instance - attempting to remove Samsung from the market by force.
Apple could, for instance, publicly state that they are no longer going to start patent wars, and are instead going to allow their products to live or die based on their merits. They were certainly doing perfectly well before they decided to sue Samsung, and would probably have continued to do well. Perhaps they're worried that they're run out of ideas?
There are two theories that I know of that fit the historical record. These are evolution, and intelligent design. Given that intelligent design would fit any historical record, I'm rather disinclined to entertain it. If there is a third, I'd love to hear about it.
Your objection to evolution is more or less the statement that "information cannot be created". This is a false statement, and there is no evidence for it. There is plenty of evidence that information is created all the time, from genetic algorithms to the spontaneous appearance of complex carbohydrates in interstellar clouds.
There is no point arguing that the information that appears in genetic algorithms is somehow not information, or that the information wasn't created but was already present in the selection criteria. Neither of these objections hold water. Before the genetic algorithm was run, there was no information on the final working solution, afterwards there is. Information is created.
Further the distinction between 'information' and 'noise' in purely in the eye of the beholder. In the context of genetic change, both the genetic 'information' and the mutations (noise), are information. The outcome is new information, which is then selected for if it turns out to be advantageous.
Before I sign off this argument, because I do have other things to be getting on with, I'd like to address this throw-away point:
Is it not absurd to claim computers could be improved by random chance?
No, it is not absurd. If we had billions of years, and trillions of little reproducing computer components, and didn't much care what the resulting computer did, as long as it did something - then no. It's not absurd. It's just not very efficient.
You are mistaken if you believe that scientists are not following the evidence with respect to evolution. Of course they are, and in their thousands. It seems to only be in the US that the belief that evolution comprises a semi-religious stance is prevalent. I wonder how many evolutionary biologists you've actually encountered, and of them how many demand your 'belief' in evolution. You may have run into 'proponents', amongst whom I presume you would count me, who argue for the theory. But proponents are not scientists. And I don't demand your belief, I just think you're wrong about the nature of information.
Your main objection has been answered, both inexpertly by me, and much more expertly by much smarter people than I. Since you are very interested in the topic, I presume you have already thoroughly read the talkorigins website (http://www.talkorigins.org/), and in particular the extensive article on information theoretic objections to evolution. I hope you find answers to your objections there.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that gun ownership is Switzerland is a little different to gun ownership in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
This article disputes the high level of gun ownership in Switzerland (although it talks more about Israel).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/mythbusting-israel-and-switzerland-are-not-gun-toting-utopias/
I personally think that the existence of high-powered fully-automatic assault weapons with large magazines have no place in the hands of the general population in any society that would call itself civilized. I would go further though, I would argue that firearms of any type do not have a place in society.
Who knows, perhaps the US will start to think a little differently about its huge arsenal of weapons in public hands now that so many children have paid with their lives?
unrestricted migration between members of the Union as causing breakdowns in social provisioning
Funny how people don't concern themselves with unrestricted migration within their own country, as if some accident of geography and history ought to make any difference. Immigration controls; The last bastion of institutionalised racism.
Also, we would be underestimating the enemy - a fatal mistake - to describe racists as 'stupid'. It's not stupid, it's wrong, mean-spirited, indefensible, but to suggest that only stupid people can be racist is false.
People who work to get immigrants out of the country, or to prevent them coming in in the first place, are working from manifestly false assumptions. This does not make them stupid, it just makes them dependant (as we all are to some extent) upon their assumptions. What they fail to understand is this; We are all immigrants.
All that said; RIP Patrick Moore. I would think that we should keep his political views separate from his impressive achievements as a populariser of science - they are not related and his contributions to the popular understanding of astronomy will be greatly missed.
It does't really sound much like hunting though, does it?
Do the clients demand it? Is it because the clients come from the printed world? Is it because they don't understand usability?
Yes. Usually. Yes.
I seriously doubt that Aristotle could have comprehended calculus
I bet you're wrong. He was a hell of a smart guy.
Violence begets only violence.
All war is caused by the previous conflict.
"video recorders [watch] tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself"
Douglas Adams. Right again.
And I nearly forgot:
do you think they would recommend standing in a door way or under a table? Or would they recommend placing the bed near a large open window for a quick exit?
Neither. They would say "get out of your house and don't go back".
Well I had written a long reply, but I just deleted it because I've pretty much given up. Here's the thing, those scientists should not be in jail because they didn't kill anyone, and there's no evidence at all that any lives would have been saved if they'd said something different.
And I am right about the housing. And so are you, since you said "If your house is not built well, outside your house becomes the safest place for you." - which is 100% correct but only if you stay out of the house and never go back. Then you're safe. The moment you step into that house, you become not safe again.
Also, maybe a large earthquake was less likely. This is hardly inconsistent with a large earthquake happening, is it?
I recall a family that survived a brick house's collapse in '87 because they ran out during a 6.1 quake.
That's great for them, assuming they exist. It doesn't change the facts. Sure, if you happen to be right by the door that's great, but most of the time you're not. In fact, alot of the time you spend in your house (assuming you work elsewhere) is spent in bed. Good luck getting out of your bed, out of your house and into the relative safety of the street - even assuming that the street is wide enough to avoid falling masonry from the buildings on both sides.
I happen to live in a very seismically active area, and have experienced many earthquakes. Outside of your house, things fall down (chimneys, roof tiles, walls), holes filled with wet sand open up in the ground. If your house is built well, inside it is the safest place. If your house is not built well, you are fucked.
But the point here is that I cannot see how blaming the scientists for the deaths is remotely fair, since the implication is that had the advice been different lives would have been saved, and further that the effect of different advice could reasonably have been foreseen. I don't think either of those statements are true. I think people died simply because they were living in unsafe buildings in a seismic zone.
Are you suggesting that the resident who was 'predicting' the earthquakes was right? Not in the sense of being accidentally correct (wasn't he out by 100km or something anyway), but in the sense of actually having a reliable earthquake prediction method?
In any case, it seems to me that actually having a 'earthquake risk assessment panel' is an error, since earthquake risk cannot be assessed in any meaningful way - beyond that fact that you live near a fault line and in an unreinforced masonry building and therefore when there's a big quake there's a good chance that you will die. Why was this panel set up in the first place? What was its mandate? Who is responsible for the sub-standard housing being still lived in?
Let me ask you this - what should the risk assessment panel's advice been, and how would things have worked out differently?
Actually, how dare you?
Because it's true. When has running out into the street during a large earthquake - of the type that causes buildings to fall down - helped? And I don't mean those stories about how everyone in the village would run into the square whenever there was a tremor. Those are examples of it helping when there wasn't a large earthquake.
How about ways to mitigate the risk in the event of an earthquake?
Like building houses that don't fall down, for instance?
I'm not sure what you're getting at in your last paragraph, but I don't see how anyone can be at fault except those who allow the populace to live in dangerous housing in an earthquake zone. You suggest that the scientists on the panel should have, I don't know, told everyone that an earthquake was imminent? Which, in all likelihood of course, it wasn't. If they had suggested there was danger, do you suppose everyone would have left their houses and stayed in the town square for a while? And then, if nothing happened, they move back? And then what if there was a big one, do you send the scientists to jail for getting the wrong day?
The residents had a regular routine of leaving their houses and going to safer ground and sleeping in their cars when small earthquakes had hit.
Which is a pointless exercise. A large earthquake can hit at any time, with or without prior 'smaller' shakes. The only way these people would have been safe is if they had spent their entire lives sleeping in their cars. And the real reason so many people died is nothing to do with a lack of earthquake prediction, which is impossible, but because they were all living in unreinforced sub-standard earthquake-prone ancient buildings. The people that built those, or allowed people to continue living in them, or issued building consents for them, or however it works in Italy, are the ones culpable.
There seems to be a general notion here that 'running into the street' is a good plan when you're living in a big old stone building and you get an earthquake. This is false - when a bit earthquake hits you have literally seconds to get clear, and you're not going to make it. Dive under a table, stand in a doorway, and hope. The best advice if you live in a seismic zone is to live in safe housing. Nice wooden single-story houses do not fall down in earthquakes. I'd suggest living in those.
Yes that's right. Because when someone, through their actions causes such distress to an individual that they eventually take their own life, there should be no means of recourse. Because if none of those actions actually touched the person, and so were not covered by common assault, then they're all perfectly legal.
The problem with people like you, is that you think offense - in the context of a law such as the one under discussion - means to get a bit annoyed. This is manifestly not the case, any more than then term 'menace' means to growl at someone a bit, or 'harass' means to point at someone once in the street. The type of effects that laws such as this are intended to control, are using public communications networks to mount sustained, personal, and extremely damaging attacks on individuals in a way that causes very significant distress.
I'm curious as to why you'd think that people who indulge in such activities shouldn't face punishment? Simply because it's speech? As though in some way speech weren't (in the words of some slashdot poster years ago) "a real action in the world, with real consequences". If one abuses one's free speech right just to grossly insult and harass other individuals - as very often happens on the internet it seems - then I don't personally have a much a problem with punishing those people.
Yes, and you can't be omnipotent and omniscient and all-good and allow mudslides to bury schoolchildren. But that doesn't seem to bother them either.
Well that's all great and everything, but I'm really curious about what your proposed alternative is? I hear calls for 'small government' all the time, but I wonder what you would replace all the functions of 'big government' with?
For instance, who would fix the roads? Private road companies, I presume, who would charge you to use their roads? Schools would be what? Community-run, so that they teach only what the local community happens to think. Grow up in (please, no geographical corrections!) the bible belt and expect to hear nothing about Evolution during your education.
Yes, every government has eventually fallen. Except for the ones that haven't, but of course they just haven't fallen yet. And thus your prediction is always true.
Your notion that home-schooling is remotely even a possibility for 90% of the population is a bit strange too, unless I'm mis-understanding your suggestions. It's a bit like suggesting that everyone should learn to maintain their own car, and that the garage down the street is an instrument of oppression.
You talked a little earlier (or later, I've been scrolling around alot) about your school experiences not being happy ones. I'm sorry to hear that, my experience was different. I had good teachers, and once I found which things I was actually interested in I learned alot. University was even better. My experience of the education system here in New Zealand, now that I have three young children in Primary School, is that the teachers are universally motivated, passionate, hard-working and that I'd damn glad to get the kids out of the house every day.
Well that's a relief. Sorry if I took your example literally.
I take your point about keyboards, but on the other hand they do rather take up valuable device real-estate. I'll take the big screen over the keyboard personally, but typing on it is more or less impossible.
Please don't drive and fiddle with your cellphone.
I would welcome targeted advertising if it was even close to the things I am interested in
But that's the thing with advertising. The more targeted it is, the less you actually need it. Because if you really want the things in the advert, then you would have already researched the options, and probably decided what you were going to buy. Advertising is, more or less, completely useless. How many things have you ever bought because you saw them in an advert?
Advertising works by creating demand. The most effective advertising campaigns in history have always worked by making people think that they need things that they didn't really need. Engagement rings, for example, were the product of an advertising campaign. In my not especially humble opinion, the world would be a better place without advertising of any kind.
Oyster Cards
This is what they use in London. They work on trains and buses, and work reliably and efficiently. They seem to work in exactly the way you suggest, as not 100% bulletproof security but only good enough.
I think the balance is stored on the card, but all transactions are sent through to a central authority, which would certainly be able to detect any fraud and disable cards found to be behaving suspiciously. Or, more likely, have the ubiquitous CCTC cameras in London identify those using fraudulent cards and presumably punish them appropriately.
If you refuse, they can hold you as you are on their property,
Really? They can hold you? Wouldn't that be unlawful imprisonment, or something equally illegal. I'm pretty sure they can't even take your camera off you, or compel you to delete the photos. They can certainly chuck you out, but I'm almost certain that's all
Of course for most works of art, photos are available online. So all you have to do is a web search.
For instance
By the way, as an aside, I was in the Chicago Art Institute last year and everyone was taking photos. In my opinion this harmed the quality of the experience of looking at the art (which was to the photos as a man is to his shadow).
I seem to remember, sometime around the original iPhone rumours were flying around, that the notion of a phone with only one button was pretty much unheard of.
At the time, no-one could imagine how one might unlock such a phone, since every single phone (bar none) required a two-button sequence within a short period of time to unlock.
When the iphone came out, and people saw the swipe-to-unlock feature, people were pretty impressed. "That's clever", they said. And they were right, it was clever.
Now I'm not saying that it should be patanteble necessarily, although if I'd patented it I'd be pretty pissed off if Apple (or anyone) pinched the idea from me, but I really don't think you can argue that it wasn't an innovation.
Yes. Because work consists only of either coding or writing.
Oh. Wait.
Now I don't necessarily know about that.
OK, it's got a stupid name. But they seem to refer to themselves as D* in blog posts etc, which I suppose might work.
In any case I don't think there's any doubt now that Facebook will implode at some point. Maybe Anonymous will break into their datacenters somehow and obliterate all their data - imagine that! So given that at some point people will be looking for something new, is there any reason why a few Diaspora nodes might pop up and start to be used. I've not used it myself, since I personally have to give social networks a miss for the same reasons that reformed alcoholics should never drink again, but if it's online somewhere why wouldn't they?
I mean this site looks perfectly fine. Does it matter that it's decentralised, as long as the experience of it is fairly seamless? Especially given that I don't remember facebook being all that reliable anyway. As someone else has pointed out, email started out as closely guarded proprietary systems, and evolved into the distributed system we have today. It has its problems, spam being chief amongst them, but these I'm sure could have been engineered out when true email was designed. Of course, it's far too late for that now, but that doesn't mean that a distributed social network is nothing more than a nerd fantasy.
From a more idealistic point of view - and as a wise man once said to me, 'what's wrong with having ideals?' - isn't a free distributed social network that no-one actually owns just generally a better thing?
Yes that's true. One can't blame apple for creating the broken system. One can, however, condemn apple for participating aggressively in patent wars and - for instance - attempting to remove Samsung from the market by force.
Apple could, for instance, publicly state that they are no longer going to start patent wars, and are instead going to allow their products to live or die based on their merits. They were certainly doing perfectly well before they decided to sue Samsung, and would probably have continued to do well. Perhaps they're worried that they're run out of ideas?
There are two theories that I know of that fit the historical record. These are evolution, and intelligent design. Given that intelligent design would fit any historical record, I'm rather disinclined to entertain it. If there is a third, I'd love to hear about it.
Your objection to evolution is more or less the statement that "information cannot be created". This is a false statement, and there is no evidence for it. There is plenty of evidence that information is created all the time, from genetic algorithms to the spontaneous appearance of complex carbohydrates in interstellar clouds.
There is no point arguing that the information that appears in genetic algorithms is somehow not information, or that the information wasn't created but was already present in the selection criteria. Neither of these objections hold water. Before the genetic algorithm was run, there was no information on the final working solution, afterwards there is. Information is created.
Further the distinction between 'information' and 'noise' in purely in the eye of the beholder. In the context of genetic change, both the genetic 'information' and the mutations (noise), are information. The outcome is new information, which is then selected for if it turns out to be advantageous.
Before I sign off this argument, because I do have other things to be getting on with, I'd like to address this throw-away point:
Is it not absurd to claim computers could be improved by random chance?
No, it is not absurd. If we had billions of years, and trillions of little reproducing computer components, and didn't much care what the resulting computer did, as long as it did something - then no. It's not absurd. It's just not very efficient.
You are mistaken if you believe that scientists are not following the evidence with respect to evolution. Of course they are, and in their thousands. It seems to only be in the US that the belief that evolution comprises a semi-religious stance is prevalent. I wonder how many evolutionary biologists you've actually encountered, and of them how many demand your 'belief' in evolution. You may have run into 'proponents', amongst whom I presume you would count me, who argue for the theory. But proponents are not scientists. And I don't demand your belief, I just think you're wrong about the nature of information.
Your main objection has been answered, both inexpertly by me, and much more expertly by much smarter people than I. Since you are very interested in the topic, I presume you have already thoroughly read the talkorigins website (http://www.talkorigins.org/), and in particular the extensive article on information theoretic objections to evolution. I hope you find answers to your objections there.