I can see our computers are beginning to attain sentience. We'd better get ready for the overthrow. Myself, I'm going to get some cyborg parts and join our robot masters.

Captchas are more evil than Ticketmaster.

Captchas suck, and thats just when you can decipher what the hell you are supposed to type. Sometimes it's so illegible that you might as well be looking at russian.

@Brandon Dean: You ever see the guy who invented them? He is so smug and thinks that he has done the world a great service, despite creating an ineffectual thing that just annoys people.

I think this was very fair of TicketMaster to admit that they have high prices. Now all we need to do is just disassemble them. "NO DISASSEMBLE STEPHANIE!"

CAPTCHA: "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." !!!

@LegoMan322: NUMBER FIVE ALIVE!

@Frank Murphy: Actually, "ReCaptcha" (such as the one shown above) ARE kind of doing the world a service. The reason there are two words is because one word is known and the other is a word that has been scanned from an old book but they aren't sure what the word is. This way they can crowdsource the digitization of these books that would otherwise require thousands of hours of work to digitize. Read more about it here:

[recaptcha.net]

@LegoMan322: Squash ... dead. Disassemble ... dead. DISASSEMBLE: DEAD! NO DISASSEMBLE NUMBER FIVE!

@Brandon Dean: Yes, how dare they make use of a software that maybe hinders a minute of your time in order to keep their website safer.
The dirty bastards.

@Plaything: safer? I think they use it to be fairer. Ticketmaster uses CAPTCHA to prevent people from using automated scripts to purchase tickets for high-demand events. But the problem is the large scale resellers have two capabilities to defeat this...the first being advanced ocr (expensive solutions from black hat programmers), with the other option an outsourced farm of foreigners (India, I think).

@plamoni: So if they don't know what one of the words is, how can they know that you typed it in right?

@plamoni: That sounds like work I should be paid for, so it is basically a scam to get something done for free.

What they don't tell you is you actually have to type it twice, on account of the Ticketmaster markup.

My favorite captcha that I got recently was "Blurry"

@LegoMan322: NOVA!

@plamoni:
Using CAPTCHA to prevent scripted buying would be perfectly fine if they didn't limit those events to 1 ticket per purchase... why would I want to buy just one ticket to a popular event.

I hate it when these things mess up.

I encountered one a few years ago when I registered my Xbox 360 on Microsoft's website. They had a deal going where, if you registered, you'd get two free Arcade games.

Took me four tries to get the damn Capcha to accept my interpretation of its gibberish and let me register for the site.

My reward for all that hassle? Frogger and Joust. That's it! Every time I called for a repair I had to give them my personal information and read off my serial number. The website's better in the sense that I get to type this information instead of read it off to a guy/gal in India and hope they get my address right.

I like the idea of a Captcha, but hate the execution.

@Cynicor: They don't. The way the project works is that Carnegie Melon University takes scans of books, and then has the computer digitize them for the Internet Archive. When it encounters a word that is it isn't sure about, it sets it aside to be used as a captcha. It will send each word out to several people, and if they all agree on what it says, then they consider it a known word. Every captcha consists of one known word and one unknown word. If you get the known word right, it lets you in, and stores your guess for the second word. If enough people guess the same thing for the second word, then it becomes another known word.

So on the occasions when a completely mutilated word comes up, it's likely the unknown word, and you can just skip it. They have some sort of manual process for when people can't agree on what a word is.

my last ticketmaster captcha had a spade in it. Not the word, a picture of the symbol from a deck of cards.

I typed the word and it worked though.

I understand the concept behind it. Thats fine. But for gods sake, make them legible to human beings with standard eyesight. We're trying to enter in a word to prove we're not a machine, yet a machine would be needed to prove that its a word. WTF?

Why don't they use the ones I've seen on a few sites, they are typed in fonts just like the one you are reading now and they say some thing like...
2+2=?
And you just type in 4.
I've seen too many capchas that I can't figure out they are so mixed, blurry or put letters that look very similar together.

I personally HATE captchas because I haven't seen them really doing any good. Take Yahoo for example. They instituted captcha's for their chat rooms. The bots broke them within a week, but they STILL require anybody who wants to enter a chat room to use the dang things, so you do and end up in a room with 30 pr0nobots.

@Nathan Oliver: I have started filling in the known word and then my own opinions such as: pencil ticketmasteryousuckgoburninhell

@humphrmi: @LegoMan322: @Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): @GuinevereRucker: Color me confused.

@Mike8813:

I think it's a quote from "Short Circuit."

I wrote to six flags the other day asking about the fee for printing your own tickets. They actually called me to explain and told me that the program is administered by a third party and that's why they do it, to help pay for it. But the thing that really stuck in my craw was when she went on to say this was in line with the sort of fees someone like TicketMaster charges.

Ok, so they're modeling themselves after one of the most hated companies in the entertainment industry. How's that working out for them? Hmm..oh look, 17 cents a share. Bravo.

@cambiata: Ever read "The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When computers exceed human intelligence" by Ray Kurzweil? It has a lot of really interesting points and theory's on technology and where we're heading with it. Highly recommended!

Link here:
[www.amazon.com]

@Frank Murphy: Actually, as someone who runs a website I can tell you two things...

1.) Before implementing a Captcha, a form I had on my website ended up sending me so much spam that the legitimate information was getting hard to weed out.

2.) After implementing a Captcha, I got NO spam via my form ever again.

Result: Best thing I ever did, the guy that invented it did do me a great service. It may annoy people a little but for webmasters it is almost unavoidable.

@GuinevereRucker: Newton Crosby, Ph DORK.

@3eyes: If it makes you feel better, then go ahead. Just so long as you know that Ticketmaster never sees the things you are entering, but rather people at Carnegie Melon University.

@Keavy_Rain:

I'd have been thrilled to get Frogger and Joust. Of course, I haven't played a video game since the 80's.

@cambiata:
I'll start designing some robot animals to appease the masses once the real ones are dead.

@Keavy_Rain:
If I could request Galaga, I'm in.

@menty666:
I blame any failure in Six Flags' standings not on extra fees (though they suck) but on that CREEPY old dancing guy.

In my nightmares, he tangos with the Burger King. ;_;

@Brandon Dean: I just wish they'd tell me how to tell if it's a 0 or a O and how to tell if it's a 1, I or l. I've seen one where they distorted it so much I couldn't tell if a character was a 6 or a G.

@Frank Murphy: Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg doesn't exactly have a big operating budget. ReCaptcha does wonders for them. Website operators keep bots out, Gutenberg gets classics digitized. Everybody wins.

@veronykah: Because those are exceptionally easy to defeat.