Provide both then, because typing a URL is a pain on most mobiles, especially urls more than 5 characters.
> If you're running a print ad you can afford a short snappy URL.
What sense would it make? You have an existing brand and an existing site, why have to create a new brand and a new site just to link to that?
> Therefore, they will be relegated forever to the sphere of computerish heiroglyphics that normal people will always ignore, because they have no obvious real world relevance.
Japan and Korea demonstrate how absolutely incorrect you are.
> By way of contrast, most of the old EAN barcodes have the number printed under them, so a human can see what they encode when the barcode scanner breaks. QR codes, not so easy.
Wait that has no relevance whatsoever to the previous half of the paragraph, you said "normal people" would always ignore QRCodes, but anyone can recognize a barcode and knows (at least roughly) what it's about. QRCode will reach that ubiquity (as I mentioned, they already have in Japan and Korea for instance), and by that time children will only have to learn about them once.
> I mean, if Google Goggles can OCR text on a menu or poster in real time... a QR code is just making things complicated.
Google Goggles can attempt to do that with all the power of Google behind it. Just about any low-power device with a camera can recognize, read, fix (qrcode embeds significant amount of redundancy for error recovery) and decode a qrcode.