What the hell is this ?

[angus]

The thing with the question mark?  Oh, I see stuff like that all the time.  Usually it's a sequence of letters and numbers in weird, melty fonts that are hard to read, and you're instructed to type them into a little dialogue box.  I think it's just to keep scripts from filling stuff out.  If you slide the bar or type in the correct sequence of numbers, then you must be for real, because they're done in a way that scripts can't manage.  (Sequence of number is random, or the position of the slide bar is mouse-driven and maybe randomly positioned.)

I suppose it's only a matter of time before even that gets hacked.

[angus]

captcha?  geekspeak. 

Good.  I learned three new words today:  captcha, ginger, and daywalker.

[angus]

"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"

LOL.  I'm not usually a fan of acronyms, but in this case I think one was merited.

And in case you're wondering, Turing refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician and possibly a high-functioning autistic person who provided the formalism for computation. 

That's right, I've been studying up on this recently. 


Oh, jmfcst, it's funny that you mention Blade.  I watched it on an airplane ride from Boston to San Francisco about 12 years ago.  I remember it well.  I have a funny story about that trip, and about that movie, but it's a long story, and my long stories tend to be very long so I'll save it for another time.