Spammers

[lawtonglenn]

...not just the little graphic "what is this word" crap that nobody can read- I hate those.
...

I heard an interview last weekend with the guy who invented the "captcha"

He was a bit embarrassed about it, knowing that everyday 200 million captchas are filled out worldwide, and at 10 seconds each that represents 500,000 hours wasted productivity EACH DAY

[240zdave]

I heard an interview last weekend with the guy who invented the "captcha"

He was a bit embarrassed about it, knowing that everyday 200 million captchas are filled out worldwide, and at 10 seconds each that represents 500,000 hours wasted productivity EACH DAY

The really fascinating part of that interview was what he decided to do after he calculated how many man hours were involved. He developed a way to use the captchas to translate books from English to another language, so every time we type in a captcha, we are translating a small part of a book. His response to the question of how long would it take to translate all of Wikipedia was about 80 hours.

[Greg Amy]

They also use Captcha to "translate" OCR'd (scanned) books where the words are not legible to the computer. So each time we do one of those we're actually typing in all the characters to some old book/manuscript (that's why we see such oddball words/characters show up). - GA

[Terry Hanushek]

Just think how many books Louis Vuitton has translated all by himself

T