Sure, go ahead and laugh at me. You think that VoIP is going to take over the world and put the phone company out of business, and I am some clueless nutcase. Right?

The fact is that the popularity and ubiquity of VoIP is going to increase because of all the hype. But hype won't be able to overcome the fact that quality isn't as good as the PSTN. Hype won't be able to hide that 911 loaction can't work without seriously impairing theusefullness of VoIP. And, most important of all, hype won't be able to hide the security problems with VoIP.

How long are you going to continue using VoIP when some script kiddie that you pissed off on IRC DDoSes your phone? Who's going to keep on using VoIP when the latest Outlook worm prevents them form making phone calls for the next two days? Who's going to keep VoIP when they realize that I, or anyone else can listen in on their calls right this minute?

VoIP is great. I use it right now. But, I haven't cut the PSTN cord and I won't cut the PSTN cord for VoIP. It's just too dangerous and it'll only be another 6 months before disaster strikes and everyone realizes how dangerous it is.

Think about it; 'Hello? Police? this is ...'. Script Kiddie says; 'Har har, I r0xorz!!!'

6 Months

True. Prostitution/slavery is a major international problem. Only a few countries, like my Canada and Saudi Arabia seem to have been able to stop this horrible practice. The US essentially enourages female slavery for some reason. And there is not a single monument in France to the prostitutes of the French underground that were essentially responsible to the intelligence that the Americans needed for D-Day.

Google used to have a search by telephone [google.com] service where you called in, said a series of search terms, and watched a results page refresh. Looks like they've taken it down, though.

Also relevant: http://www.dundi.com/ [dundi.com]
"DUNDi is a peer-to-peer system for locating Internet gateways to telephony services. Unlike traditional centralized services (such as the remarkably simple and concise ENUM standard), DUNDi is fully-distributed with no centralized authority whatsoever."

Email addresses aren't a good representative for all text. I may only have four or five email addresses memorized (although that's due in good measure to the fact that my email program knows them all and associates them with names and nicknames in its own DNS-like system), but I have hundreds of website addresses memorized, compared to only a couple of dozen phone numbers. Look at how many people's names a person knows, or at their vocabularies, compared to how many numbers they have memorized. I stand by the idea that words and names are easier to memorize than long strings of numbers.

Email addresses are bad, and I think there are a number of reasons for that. Primarily, they are almost always at some arbitrary seeming domain- uchicago.edu, columbus.rr.com, insighttelco.net. etc. These are hopeless to remember. Also, a lot of email addresses are assigned, or chosen poorly. For example, at Chicago, it was first initial, middle initial, first 5 letters of last name. How stupid is that to remember, among each of a bijillion other arbitrary systems?

But if you choose your own, and don't have any domain (or the domain for all of them is "phone" or something), then you don't have that problem.