I take your point, Emellaich. In fact, I don't object to the traditional Captcha mechanism. My irritation is directed against ReCaptcha in particular (and, by the way, this has been around for quite a while now, long before Google took an interest).
My point about ReCaptcha is that one of the two words is, by definition, "difficult". That's why it's there. So you have to use quite a lot more effort to negotiate the system than you would with the normal sort of Captcha (which is typically based on just four or five letters, displayed fairly clearly). This makes the whole experience that much more trying.
Now, if that extra difficulty was directed to defeating Spam, I wouldn't object. But its main purpose is to help the company that promotes it to reduce their proof-reading costs. By all means, make your prospective customers work to give you their business, if you can show that it's in their interest, but not if it's just for the convenience of a third party.
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