The Daring Dufas wrote:

https://www.magicjackplus2012deal.com... long link)

I was an early adopter of the original USB only model and the call
quality is much improved over the early days. I use it today and
have it call forwarded to my pager. It is the best thing in the
world to use as a phone number to give out to those who you
suspect will not protect your privacy.

Why not get a google-voice phone number?

It's free, and does the same thing.

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

To get a google-voice phone number (which can be a phone number from any
US area-code of your choosing) you need to give google a call-back phone
number that you can answer during the sign-up. If you don't want to
give your real home land-line or cell number, then do the sign-up from
some other location where you can answer the phone if it rings (at work,
a friends's house, etc). You can even give it a toll-free number for
the call-back number. You can configure google-voice so that it never
forwards the call to the call-back number - so it can just act like a
voice-mail system and sends you an e-mail of the transcript of the
message.

If you do give google-voice your real home or cell-phone number, then
the way it works is that if someone calls your google-voice number,
google then calls you at your real number and connects both ends of the
call so you end up talking to the person who called the google-voice
number.

For anyone that wants to make out-going phone calls from their computer,
and if you have a gmail account, then get the google-talk plug-in and
you can call any phone number in UC/Canada for free (assuming you are
also somewhere inside US/Canada). This is like skype, except that skype
wants you to pay for these calls.