You Didn't Match the Letters on the Page

By -
I understand the problem of spam on blogs or robots buying from tickets sites. (Imagine the reaction of someone in 1980 if you told them, "In 2007, we will have a big problem with robots snatching up the tickets for major public events.) But this method of putting up all squiggly letters and making the purported user match them sucks. Programs can't read the letters, but you know what...I can't either! The letters are all deliberately distorted -- so how are we supposed to tell an 'l' from an 'I'? An 'S' from an 's'? A 'W' from a 'w'? I find I miss something about 1/3 the time.

Much better idea: I was at a site the other day that instructed me: "Put the answer to 3 + 4 in the box to the left." No letter guessing involved! Rotate the questions automagically, i.e., "What is the name of the animal that says 'meow'?" and you're good to go.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:32 PM

    Put the answer to 3 + 4 in the box to the left.

    I can't. "3 + 4" isn't a question, so it doesn't have an answer.

    What is the name of the animal that says 'meow'

    Strictly speaking, only humans say 'meow'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah9:50 AM

    Oh Roderick, you are so tricksy!

    This is why philosophers have such a hard time getting past verification screens.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous4:12 AM

    I miss the 9Dragons gold that I once had a lot.We go to earn the 9 Dragons gold and go to buy the weapons with them. Sometimes I will buy a lot of things to buy 9 Dragons gold so i can get some cheap 9Dragons gold and then i will have a lot of 9Dragons money in the game.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more