Thanks for all the replies. Certainly Welchia had something to do with the recent tightening, general ping I believe was more an obscurity issue. Overall I believe it has to do with a notion of centralized versus decentralized control of systems and networks. Yeah, I can get along without ping (and traceroute, etc.), though it makes life more difficult and certainly pisses me off.

BTW, I am not just running a desktop system. I administer a cluster of ~12 machines (on the side, actually I am a remote sensing scientist), which include a couple of webservers, ssh access for work at home, sendmail (with majordomo also), anonymous ftp (configured to stop warez users), ntp (well, before incoming ntp traffic was blocked), a gnutella server (which shares noncopyright academic papers etc., and used to do pretty well before the firewall), and a remote backup site for our user's home machines. I suspect (more than suspect) the "nazis" in control want to centralize remaining services.

For scripts, pung (http://quozl.linux.org.au/pung/) makes a nice substitute for ping when the latter is blocked.

Well I have played with blocking icmp, and I can still find my self with
nmap xx.xx.xx.xx -P0!!