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>Capitalism can't produce common goods.

Yes it can. Capitalism is the most efficient producer of common and uncommon goods mankind has ever devised. It is also the system most compatible with free choice and democracy. Do you want to move to Cuba? Go ahead...

>Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government.

As surely as the airplane would've never had existed if it weren't for the wright brothers.

>It was created in an academic environment, by passionate people that cared about the advance of technolog (indirectly: of mankind).

It was, in fact, created in a military-sponsored environment, by passionate people who cared about the advance of the soviets and the threat of nuclear weapons (indirectly: nationalists).

>Internet advanced quickly, different protocols appeared, once replacing the other (Gopher, SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, etc.). Then the companies came. Those set of protocols froze, some began to fade.

Gopher was text-only and superseded by the Web. All of the other protocols you mentioned (SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP) are still aroud, still relevant, still ported to new systems and kept current. But, even if they werent, are you trying to say that between POP and IMAP we must have both forever?

>Companies didn't care about "what's right".

What is "What's right"? What you think is right? What I think is right? What they think is right?

>They didn't care about advance the network.

Unless it would make them money. Or differentiate their products. Or make them look good to prospective customers. Thinking about it, they did care.

>The HTTP/1.0 -> 1.1 transition took years, and still hasn't finished (e.g. http pipelining). IMAP mail stalled, and got replaced by webmail. Multicast was never deployed at large. Newsgroups got replaced by phpbb.

Water-fueled cars were kept away from the market by big oil companies. HIV virus was created to sell vaccines. Amiga OS was sabotaged by IBM. OS/2 was replaced by Windows. Sinclair computers went out of business. But not all is lost! Blue Mountain Arts is still around!

But what about spam? I know that most of us here wouldn't click the link. But I've seen spam that was supposed to be from bluemountain that had this exploit in it. Of course the headers told a different story (it originated in Poland), but my point is that you've got the usual gang of idiots that will click any link in an email if they think "Oooo, Mom send me another e-card".

My guess is that since blocking this software would interfere with Permissioned Media's business model, Symantec is worried about being sued. Since this is a novel situation, the law is necessarily unsettled on whether they'd be entitled to block it, so they are erring on the side of caution.

Would you trust M$N to block mail for you? I would not, nor should anyone who reads this sad story of how Micro$quish abused their junk mail filter for hot mail. Like my wife asked in outrage, "They can do that, why won't they block all those 'hot and horny teens' messages'?!"

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Microsoft Apologists would have you forget the whole Blue Mountain Arts episode. Where after setting up a competing service to deliver e-greeting cards at MSN, they started creating incompatabilities in MSIE to make use of Blue Mountain's site impossible. Then they instituted mail filters in Outlook Express to allow users to control spam. One of the first sites to be dumped in to the spam filter was the competing Blue Mountain Arts.

Microsoft's Response of course (queue up the Phil Collins) was "There must be some misunderstanding. There must be some kind of mistake."

Those who willfully ignore the abuse of power by the folks in Redmond and the lies to which they stretch to rationalize their behavior are at best sociopaths. Curtly respond to them and dismiss them. They are unable to discern reality, because they refuse to accept what history might teach them. Besides they are probably being paid by a third party PR organization hired by Microsoft.

`nuff said.

Eric Ziegast
Blue Mountain Arts

Physics once meant everything to me, but now I'm doing the "greed is good" thing on the Internet.

Many others followed the same path. There's a vast physics diaspora out there. Among many others, consider Dr. Stephen Schutz, MIT graduate and Princeton physics Ph.D. who recently sold his online greeting card company to Excite for nearly a billion dollars.

On the other hand, I know a couple of folks who foolishly persisted in their dreams of a science career well past the age of employability (late 30s), and now they're shipwrecked and facing reality. It seems they have a lot in common with failed actors, musicians, and athletes who didn't make the big leagues. When did scientists become "starving artists"?

Is there any hope of reversing the tremendous attrition rate of potential scientists? In good conscience, should we even be encouraging young people to pursue science careers given their dim career prospects?

Do you share this pessimism, and what changes do you see in the decades to come, for better or for worse?