I've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.

What is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

But what we all have to learn is that we can't do everything ourselves.

Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address - just one - this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.

There are things that have excited me to no end, and it's the sharing of knowledge that has come about on the network, and I see at an increasing pace this ability to share what we know.

I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.