"Their obsession with heterosexuality gives a narrow miss. When raising kids, it doesn't matter as much the form of the family unit, as that it is a stable and self-sufficient familty unit."
I'll demote my own post because I don't have much of a link to back it up: There have been studies that show pretty conclusively that the form does matter; children who do not have both a strong male and female role model growing up have a disadvantage compared to those who do not.
I believe there was an article in that hotbed of conservativism, The Atlantic Monthly(2), that covered the research many years back.
(2) Current subscription to TAM required to read online, but I bet your local library has a microfiche or dead-tree version hanging around somewhere.
According to Dr. Hans Mark, former NASA Interim Head and Aerospace Engineering professor at the University of Texas, the answer is: Roll back women's lib.
Back in the days before women's lib, and there were few jobs available to intelligent, educated women, the best and brightest women became teachers. As a result, the United States had an astonishingly good public education system, because we had the best teachers anywhere.
The idea of rolling back women's lib is obviously both abhorrent and unworkable, but there is a legitimate point: Good teachers leads to good education. If our best and brightest desire to become teachers, then our schools will become better whether we want them to or not.
Another problem is that in certain American sub-cultures, education is not considered a viable means to open up opportunities. It is, but these sub-cultures don't consider it to be. Consider Charles Schulz, who succeeded despite terrible failures in school; one year, he failed everything. His parents, who had never had any education, had no idea how to guide him; in an interview, when asked how he reacted to Schulz failing an entire year, his father replied: "I thought he did pretty well."(*) If the parents don't value or understand education, the children won't be successful.
And on that second topic, unfortunately the Religious Right's crowing about "Family Values" is right on target. (Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day.) The only way to solve it is to find a way to reinforce the structural and legal support for the family unit. In the past, this existed in the form of legalized punishments for unwed mothers. Nowadays, we have legalized punishments for married people (such as the "marriage tax penalty"). What we need are structural incentives for people to get married, stay married, and take care of children. Now that sounds pathetic -- doing these things is what you're supposed to do, after all -- but the legal climate today is such that you are punished for doing these things and rewarded for irresponsibility. Until that changes, these sub-cultures that formed won't change.
Shoot as many people as you want! Cuss until your face turns blue! Practice satanic rituals! Invade foreign countries! We don't care! But show one image of consensual adults fucking, and we'll lock you up in jail you SEX CRIMINAL!
In Ultima, becoming the Avatar is just becoming the shining example of maxing out each of the 8 virtues, which in turn were picked by the effectively-immortal king of the realm. No God, no religion.
He's right that there's a distinction between ethicality and morality; back to the subject, we're talking about a game where you're supposed to follow certain pre-defined principles, meditate at shrines by focusing on a rune while chanting a mantra and learn how the principles fit together to achieve an ultimate spiritual goal of enlightenment.
Yeah, real secular, that. The fact that there's no God doesn't mean there's no religion. See Buddhism.
Garriott can think what he wants, but what you did in Ultima IV was not about behaving ethically. Garriott was behaving ethically by making it, but your character in the game was following a moral, spiritual, religious path.
Take Peanuts by Charles M Schulz and BC, for example. Both artists are/were extremely devout Christians. In the former comic, Schulz focused on making the comic funny first, and he uses his beliefs as a springboard towards a joke or a humorous situation, such as one comic where Charlie Brown's baseball teammates are babbling theology while Charlie Brown himself is standing on the mound, physically above them all, mentally below them, and with a "good grief" expression more accurately saying, "Uhm... can we get back to baseball?"
In the latter case, you see the comic used as a podium for lectures, for example a recent comic where Wiley's writing under his tree and writes how Darwin "made monkeys out of you and me."
Now in games, I think we've already seen religion done right: Ultima IV. Being "moral" within the game is not just context, but the end of the game itself, and in that case, it made for a better, more interesting and (most vitally) more fun game than its hack-n-slash predecessors in which the goal was to defeat the murderous villain by being more murderous than him/her. Its religion is not specifically Christian, but the Ultima series shows the general principle that you can make a fun game based on religion. Making a game fun for a different set of beliefs is just applying the Ultima IV-VI design principles to different specific dogmas.
Of course, it's all easier said than done, but that's why good designers make the big bucks.
I'm perfectly well aware that Christianity is not one big happy family as you suggest, because I'm one of those rabble-rousers who likes to stir things up in his church and between churches. I grew up in a church where the prevailing culture was, "It's really and truly okay to disagree openly with the minister's sermon," so the idea of Christians disagreeing with each other is what I consider to be the norm (although I know in reality the church I grew up in was exceptional).
"This kind of vandalism can happen if the victim is not considered 'worthy' of the iconography or if the symbol in question represents an opposing church."
OK, you are just making shit up here, and I'm calling you on it. I grew up in the Bible Belt, full of all-kinds of self-righteousness (of all kinds, from the "You're only good if you go to our church" to the "You're only good if you're ecumenical" in my own church), and never, ever did I ever hear even the slightest intimation of the suggestion of the thought of anyone doing something like this. Not in the big mega-denominations. Not in the extreme non-denominational churches. Nowhere in-between.
I can conceive of something possibly happening if someone were a member of e.g. the Jonestown folks, Koresh's Branch Davidian group or the Scientologists, but that's also just pulling things out of my ass; I've never actually heard of any of these groups doing things like that, just the suggestion that they'd be capable of doing it.
"I cant remember ever hearing of atheists assaulting religous people's person or property because they had a god sticker on it."
So you've never heard of China? Or the USSR? Does Cuba ring a bell?
You know, those countries where all religions* are "the opiate of the masses**" and all that?
*All religions that are not Communism, that is.
**I'm beginning to believe that the real opiates of the masses are blogs and protest marches. You can rant and cheer and protest all you want, and accomplish exactly nothing. But it makes you feel better, so blog/protest away!
They don't need any organization; the government, and Chinese culture in general, does not understand or respect the concept of "intellectual property."
In the United States, Information wants to be Free. In Soviet Russia, Freedom wants to be Information. In China, Information has always been Free As Long As It Doesn't Piss Off Any Government Officials.
The fact that it's not so easy is the whole point. It's particularly difficult when all of the IP you'd potentially be able to build upon is owned by a company that has no intention of giving it to you, and doesn't even sell a competing product.
I knew someone was going to bring that up. I was going to say something to try and head 'em off, and then I didn't.
Of course you realize that it is not the fires you made that put out the wildfire. You're not "fighting fire with fire" in the sense that you're trying to shoot flames with a flamethrower.
But... but... you've marked ME as a FRIEND, and I can't think of a better description of me than:
"[A user] that other people think [is] smart (and get moderated up) but who [has] a tendency to post factually incorrect and/or unpleasantly inflammatory material."
I mean, that's me to a T. But then, you and holly both know that, and still you love me, you really really love me!
I see people are quick to point at the blame-of-the-month, outsourcing, but without really looking at how things got this way.
See, if there were tons of software jobs out there to begin with, outsourcing would be just a drop in the ocean. But the demand for software isn't increasing. Why not?
Well, try the fact that the only software that's profitable to make is already made by one company that dominates the industry, and its only competitors are open-source freeware.
You're shaking your head. "Another Slashdot anti-Microsoft idiot," you say, as you point your mouse towards the -1 moderation dialogue. Well, so what new e-mail program/web browser/media player/operating system/spreadsheet/word processor/other commonly-used application have you written lately that wasn't Microsoft's or free?
And it's not just Microsoft; look at the game industry consolidation, where a handful of companies dominate. Or graphics, where there were once dozens of companies making PC graphics cards there's now only two major ones (and the occasional intel chipset). Throughout the industry, you're either with the Big Company or you're out of luck. There's no competition outside of webspace, and even that is consolidating.
Or you're saying, "But all those new jobs in a competitive market would be outsourced, too!" Well, only if there's enough supply to meet the demand; if not, the cost of outsourcing rises (including the decrease in quality as fourth-rate engineers are pressed into service to meet the demand) and outsourcing is no longer an issue.
No, we need to bust up the monopolies, for real this time. It's bad for you and me because it means fewer jobs for you and me. It's bad for your boss because it means single-source suppliers can throttle your boss for every dime he has.
It's just another cost of sponsoring a monopoly: Your job.
Think about that the next time you want to buy a word processor.
Short version for the impatient: I found Apple SFF (Small Form Factor) hardware to be 60% as expensive as equivalent Intel-based SFF hardware when shopping for a computer at the beginning of this year.
At the beginning of the year, I was looking for a replacement web server. Rimbosity.com was running on a P-233 MMX that was loud, had no APM support, and using significant amounts of electricity. It was in a full tower box that I bought back in the day when I equated the size of my computer with the manliness of my geekdom.
So I was looking for something small, quiet, and low-powered, but not a laptop since I saw it a waste to pay for the extra expenses of a battery, integrated LCD or keyboard. And while I'm upgrading, I might as well have a processor in the Gigahertz range.
Looking through the catalogs of (usually Pentium-M based) machines, I found that I could have a sufficient barebones system starting at about $300. That's without factory system testing, hard disk, processor or RAM. Adding those in, you end up with prices starting around $900 and easily hitting four figures. I could get stuff for less, but it meant cutting features (e.g. going to 700MHz or slower processors).
While I was looking, Apple announced the Mini. Micro-sized. 85W max power usage. The fan only runs when under heavy CPU load, and with a low-hit webserver, that would be "almost never." Cost? $500. The equivalent feature set in the PC world would have been on the high end of the $900-$1000 range (and that's assuming a Pentium M at 1.2 GHz is as fast as a G4 at 1.2 GHz, which is dubious).
There were other benefits. I don't have to bother installing Linux; I got SSH + Apache + PHP + firewall right out of the box by just clicking a few checkboxes. I got iLife '05, which I immediately installed on my old iBook. It took me a whole 30 minutes to get it out of the box and set up, including all Apache configuration and putting the new web site on. And Apple has a default 1 year warranty whereas the pre-built Intel SFF's have only 90 day warranties and the barebones systems have no warranty.
There were downsides. I had to buy a USB-Keyboard/Mouse adapter for my old input devices (about $25), and a USB-Parallel adapter for the printer (about $30). The USB-Parallel adapter doesn't always work with my old Laserjet IIIP. And my ability to administer OSX from the command line pales in comparison to my Linux command line wizardry, so I had to learn how to do VNC over SSH.
But I don't see "learning new things" as a cost as much as a benefit, and the cost of the extra hardware is still much less than what I'd have to pay to have an Intel-based PC of any quality in that price range.
Going low-power + Small Form Factor (SFF) had a significant impact on our electric bills. The room is quiet now -- you can't hear the Mini's hard drive spinning unless you open the closet door, step on your tip-toes, and listen really carefully, whereas the old web server kept a nice fan din throughout the living room. And with the space we saved, the wife was able to put her sewing equipment (machines, thread and all) in the vacated closet space.
I could have had that with an Intel-based SFF PC, but I would have had to pay $350 more up front for the same features and spend more time getting the system up and running.
So not only is it not true that Apple is more expensive, Apple hardware can be much cheaper if you're comparing equivalent systems.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
You're right that it started to really pick up steam in the 1960's, and by now you've already read the responses that this idea's been around for quite a while longer.
This disconnect between when the idea came about and when it became popular -- notably, that it became really popular a good time after evolution became commone knowledge -- demonstrates a big problem.
Now it's a cliché to mention that science and religion seek to answer different questions. Well, that's making it difficult for Creationists and Scientists to talk about the issue. See, the Creationists really only want to talk about the Bible, and the Scientists really only want to talk about observable natural phenomenon. So while they each shout at each other and fail to communicate on this basic level, they each got more and more entrenched.
They are now to the point where they are unable to look at their own points of view critically.
This is a far worse situation for Christians than it is for Scientists. Scientists at least have a certain culture to where unexpected results can, on occasion, change the way the majority thinks.
Christians, however, are not only blind to the huge theological problems and Biblical contradictions the New Earth idea causes, but the numbers of people who go for the New Earth theory are increasing rapidly.
I think part of the problem are all the darn begats in Genesis. Well-intentioned folks will sit down to read the Bible, get to the begats, their eyes glaze over and they give up.
Or maybe they'll get all the way through, but by the time you hit Psalms 90 it may take a while to realize that it was written by the same guy who (traditionally) transcribed Genesis 1, and a bit more of a stretch to see why the two are related at all.
Or maybe they just don't think about the fact that the Sun being made on the 4th day (right there in Genesis 1) might have something to do with it. (Incidentally, when I was at the Institute for Creation Research and pointed this out to the tour guide, his idea was that God created a "temporary light." And this idea that you just pulled out of your nether regions is somehow better than my idea that I pulled out of scripture?)
So, you have a bunch of folks who never got past page 17 of the Bible who go ahead and believe whatever they're told.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't read any further than that sentence, did you?
"Their obsession with heterosexuality gives a narrow miss. When raising kids, it doesn't matter as much the form of the family unit, as that it is a stable and self-sufficient familty unit."
I'll demote my own post because I don't have much of a link to back it up: There have been studies that show pretty conclusively that the form does matter; children who do not have both a strong male and female role model growing up have a disadvantage compared to those who do not.
I believe there was an article in that hotbed of conservativism, The Atlantic Monthly(2), that covered the research many years back.
(2) Current subscription to TAM required to read online, but I bet your local library has a microfiche or dead-tree version hanging around somewhere.
According to Dr. Hans Mark, former NASA Interim Head and Aerospace Engineering professor at the University of Texas, the answer is: Roll back women's lib.
Back in the days before women's lib, and there were few jobs available to intelligent, educated women, the best and brightest women became teachers. As a result, the United States had an astonishingly good public education system, because we had the best teachers anywhere.
The idea of rolling back women's lib is obviously both abhorrent and unworkable, but there is a legitimate point: Good teachers leads to good education. If our best and brightest desire to become teachers, then our schools will become better whether we want them to or not.
Another problem is that in certain American sub-cultures, education is not considered a viable means to open up opportunities. It is, but these sub-cultures don't consider it to be. Consider Charles Schulz, who succeeded despite terrible failures in school; one year, he failed everything. His parents, who had never had any education, had no idea how to guide him; in an interview, when asked how he reacted to Schulz failing an entire year, his father replied: "I thought he did pretty well."(*) If the parents don't value or understand education, the children won't be successful.
And on that second topic, unfortunately the Religious Right's crowing about "Family Values" is right on target. (Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day.) The only way to solve it is to find a way to reinforce the structural and legal support for the family unit. In the past, this existed in the form of legalized punishments for unwed mothers. Nowadays, we have legalized punishments for married people (such as the "marriage tax penalty"). What we need are structural incentives for people to get married, stay married, and take care of children. Now that sounds pathetic -- doing these things is what you're supposed to do, after all -- but the legal climate today is such that you are punished for doing these things and rewarded for irresponsibility. Until that changes, these sub-cultures that formed won't change.
(*)Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, edited by M Thomas Inge
Shoot as many people as you want! Cuss until your face turns blue! Practice satanic rituals! Invade foreign countries! We don't care! But show one image of consensual adults fucking, and we'll lock you up in jail you SEX CRIMINAL!
Hello, did someone say "Vi clone in LISP?"Ya mean, like that?
In Ultima, becoming the Avatar is just becoming the shining example of maxing out each of the 8 virtues, which in turn were picked by the effectively-immortal king of the realm. No God, no religion.
He's right that there's a distinction between ethicality and morality; back to the subject, we're talking about a game where you're supposed to follow certain pre-defined principles, meditate at shrines by focusing on a rune while chanting a mantra and learn how the principles fit together to achieve an ultimate spiritual goal of enlightenment.
Yeah, real secular, that. The fact that there's no God doesn't mean there's no religion. See Buddhism.
Garriott can think what he wants, but what you did in Ultima IV was not about behaving ethically. Garriott was behaving ethically by making it, but your character in the game was following a moral, spiritual, religious path.
That's a good point, and it reflects the way they see Christianity as well.
Take Peanuts by Charles M Schulz and BC, for example. Both artists are/were extremely devout Christians. In the former comic, Schulz focused on making the comic funny first, and he uses his beliefs as a springboard towards a joke or a humorous situation, such as one comic where Charlie Brown's baseball teammates are babbling theology while Charlie Brown himself is standing on the mound, physically above them all, mentally below them, and with a "good grief" expression more accurately saying, "Uhm... can we get back to baseball?"
In the latter case, you see the comic used as a podium for lectures, for example a recent comic where Wiley's writing under his tree and writes how Darwin "made monkeys out of you and me."
Now in games, I think we've already seen religion done right: Ultima IV. Being "moral" within the game is not just context, but the end of the game itself, and in that case, it made for a better, more interesting and (most vitally) more fun game than its hack-n-slash predecessors in which the goal was to defeat the murderous villain by being more murderous than him/her. Its religion is not specifically Christian, but the Ultima series shows the general principle that you can make a fun game based on religion. Making a game fun for a different set of beliefs is just applying the Ultima IV-VI design principles to different specific dogmas.
Of course, it's all easier said than done, but that's why good designers make the big bucks.
what slashdot needs is "+1, pwn3d the parent"
I'm perfectly well aware that Christianity is not one big happy family as you suggest, because I'm one of those rabble-rousers who likes to stir things up in his church and between churches. I grew up in a church where the prevailing culture was, "It's really and truly okay to disagree openly with the minister's sermon," so the idea of Christians disagreeing with each other is what I consider to be the norm (although I know in reality the church I grew up in was exceptional).
"This kind of vandalism can happen if the victim is not considered 'worthy' of the iconography or if the symbol in question represents an opposing church."
OK, you are just making shit up here, and I'm calling you on it. I grew up in the Bible Belt, full of all-kinds of self-righteousness (of all kinds, from the "You're only good if you go to our church" to the "You're only good if you're ecumenical" in my own church), and never, ever did I ever hear even the slightest intimation of the suggestion of the thought of anyone doing something like this. Not in the big mega-denominations. Not in the extreme non-denominational churches. Nowhere in-between.
I can conceive of something possibly happening if someone were a member of e.g. the Jonestown folks, Koresh's Branch Davidian group or the Scientologists, but that's also just pulling things out of my ass; I've never actually heard of any of these groups doing things like that, just the suggestion that they'd be capable of doing it.
"I cant remember ever hearing of atheists assaulting religous people's person or property because they had a god sticker on it."
So you've never heard of China? Or the USSR? Does Cuba ring a bell?
You know, those countries where all religions* are "the opiate of the masses**" and all that?
*All religions that are not Communism, that is.
**I'm beginning to believe that the real opiates of the masses are blogs and protest marches. You can rant and cheer and protest all you want, and accomplish exactly nothing. But it makes you feel better, so blog/protest away!
They don't need any organization; the government, and Chinese culture in general, does not understand or respect the concept of "intellectual property."
In the United States, Information wants to be Free.
In Soviet Russia, Freedom wants to be Information.
In China, Information has always been Free As Long As It Doesn't Piss Off Any Government Officials.
It's complicated.
The fact that it's not so easy is the whole point. It's particularly difficult when all of the IP you'd potentially be able to build upon is owned by a company that has no intention of giving it to you, and doesn't even sell a competing product.
*sigh*
Well, good, that's nice to see.
A spat they had made the news, but I guess the fact they got over it wasn't going to sell papers/ad space.
Is that the case? Last I'd heard, NeoOffice/J and OpenOffice.org hated each other's guts.
Or something.
I knew someone was going to bring that up. I was going to say something to try and head 'em off, and then I didn't.
Of course you realize that it is not the fires you made that put out the wildfire. You're not "fighting fire with fire" in the sense that you're trying to shoot flames with a flamethrower.
But... but... you've marked ME as a FRIEND, and I can't think of a better description of me than:
:)
"[A user] that other people think [is] smart (and get moderated up) but who [has] a tendency to post factually incorrect and/or unpleasantly inflammatory material."
I mean, that's me to a T. But then, you and holly both know that, and still you love me, you really really love me!
-1, Offtopic. OK I'll shut up now
Ultimately, the best you can do is to try to encourage people to not be jerks. User-specific blacklists might help, too.
Actually, I've marked all of my Freaks as Friends.
You might say I'm not a big fan of fighting fire with fire. Even grade schoolers know you don't put out a fire by lighting more fires.
"I think a better approach is abandoning all hope of doing good deeds at the Federal level."
:)
What? Now you're making sense. That has no business in political affairs.
I see people are quick to point at the blame-of-the-month, outsourcing, but without really looking at how things got this way.
See, if there were tons of software jobs out there to begin with, outsourcing would be just a drop in the ocean. But the demand for software isn't increasing. Why not?
Well, try the fact that the only software that's profitable to make is already made by one company that dominates the industry, and its only competitors are open-source freeware.
You're shaking your head. "Another Slashdot anti-Microsoft idiot," you say, as you point your mouse towards the -1 moderation dialogue. Well, so what new e-mail program/web browser/media player/operating system/spreadsheet/word processor/other commonly-used application have you written lately that wasn't Microsoft's or free?
And it's not just Microsoft; look at the game industry consolidation, where a handful of companies dominate. Or graphics, where there were once dozens of companies making PC graphics cards there's now only two major ones (and the occasional intel chipset). Throughout the industry, you're either with the Big Company or you're out of luck. There's no competition outside of webspace, and even that is consolidating.
Or you're saying, "But all those new jobs in a competitive market would be outsourced, too!" Well, only if there's enough supply to meet the demand; if not, the cost of outsourcing rises (including the decrease in quality as fourth-rate engineers are pressed into service to meet the demand) and outsourcing is no longer an issue.
No, we need to bust up the monopolies, for real this time. It's bad for you and me because it means fewer jobs for you and me. It's bad for your boss because it means single-source suppliers can throttle your boss for every dime he has.
It's just another cost of sponsoring a monopoly: Your job.
Think about that the next time you want to buy a word processor.
Short version for the impatient: I found Apple SFF (Small Form Factor) hardware to be 60% as expensive as equivalent Intel-based SFF hardware when shopping for a computer at the beginning of this year.
At the beginning of the year, I was looking for a replacement web server. Rimbosity.com was running on a P-233 MMX that was loud, had no APM support, and using significant amounts of electricity. It was in a full tower box that I bought back in the day when I equated the size of my computer with the manliness of my geekdom.
So I was looking for something small, quiet, and low-powered, but not a laptop since I saw it a waste to pay for the extra expenses of a battery, integrated LCD or keyboard. And while I'm upgrading, I might as well have a processor in the Gigahertz range.
Looking through the catalogs of (usually Pentium-M based) machines, I found that I could have a sufficient barebones system starting at about $300. That's without factory system testing, hard disk, processor or RAM. Adding those in, you end up with prices starting around $900 and easily hitting four figures. I could get stuff for less, but it meant cutting features (e.g. going to 700MHz or slower processors).
While I was looking, Apple announced the Mini. Micro-sized. 85W max power usage. The fan only runs when under heavy CPU load, and with a low-hit webserver, that would be "almost never." Cost? $500. The equivalent feature set in the PC world would have been on the high end of the $900-$1000 range (and that's assuming a Pentium M at 1.2 GHz is as fast as a G4 at 1.2 GHz, which is dubious).
There were other benefits. I don't have to bother installing Linux; I got SSH + Apache + PHP + firewall right out of the box by just clicking a few checkboxes. I got iLife '05, which I immediately installed on my old iBook. It took me a whole 30 minutes to get it out of the box and set up, including all Apache configuration and putting the new web site on. And Apple has a default 1 year warranty whereas the pre-built Intel SFF's have only 90 day warranties and the barebones systems have no warranty.
There were downsides. I had to buy a USB-Keyboard/Mouse adapter for my old input devices (about $25), and a USB-Parallel adapter for the printer (about $30). The USB-Parallel adapter doesn't always work with my old Laserjet IIIP. And my ability to administer OSX from the command line pales in comparison to my Linux command line wizardry, so I had to learn how to do VNC over SSH.
But I don't see "learning new things" as a cost as much as a benefit, and the cost of the extra hardware is still much less than what I'd have to pay to have an Intel-based PC of any quality in that price range.
Going low-power + Small Form Factor (SFF) had a significant impact on our electric bills. The room is quiet now -- you can't hear the Mini's hard drive spinning unless you open the closet door, step on your tip-toes, and listen really carefully, whereas the old web server kept a nice fan din throughout the living room. And with the space we saved, the wife was able to put her sewing equipment (machines, thread and all) in the vacated closet space.
I could have had that with an Intel-based SFF PC, but I would have had to pay $350 more up front for the same features and spend more time getting the system up and running.
So not only is it not true that Apple is more expensive, Apple hardware can be much cheaper if you're comparing equivalent systems.
Starting in the 1960s, and just reaching a fever pitch, we have millions of christians who swear that their bible/religion/church says that the Earth is only 6000 years old.
You're right that it started to really pick up steam in the 1960's, and by now you've already read the responses that this idea's been around for quite a while longer.
This disconnect between when the idea came about and when it became popular -- notably, that it became really popular a good time after evolution became commone knowledge -- demonstrates a big problem.
Now it's a cliché to mention that science and religion seek to answer different questions. Well, that's making it difficult for Creationists and Scientists to talk about the issue. See, the Creationists really only want to talk about the Bible, and the Scientists really only want to talk about observable natural phenomenon. So while they each shout at each other and fail to communicate on this basic level, they each got more and more entrenched.
They are now to the point where they are unable to look at their own points of view critically.
This is a far worse situation for Christians than it is for Scientists. Scientists at least have a certain culture to where unexpected results can, on occasion, change the way the majority thinks.
Christians, however, are not only blind to the huge theological problems and Biblical contradictions the New Earth idea causes, but the numbers of people who go for the New Earth theory are increasing rapidly.
I think part of the problem are all the darn begats in Genesis. Well-intentioned folks will sit down to read the Bible, get to the begats, their eyes glaze over and they give up.
Or maybe they'll get all the way through, but by the time you hit Psalms 90 it may take a while to realize that it was written by the same guy who (traditionally) transcribed Genesis 1, and a bit more of a stretch to see why the two are related at all.
Or maybe they just don't think about the fact that the Sun being made on the 4th day (right there in Genesis 1) might have something to do with it. (Incidentally, when I was at the Institute for Creation Research and pointed this out to the tour guide, his idea was that God created a "temporary light." And this idea that you just pulled out of your nether regions is somehow better than my idea that I pulled out of scripture?)
So, you have a bunch of folks who never got past page 17 of the Bible who go ahead and believe whatever they're told.
It's as bad as politics. Really.
So that's why I was kicked out of grad school...
(Of course, my laziness had nothing to do with it.)