why captcha is crap

I have noticed an increased use of "captcha" technology lately, and it's starting to get annoying. I understand the need for something like this, since there are all too many internet gangsters out there duping websites with automated software and spamming bots, but it seems to me that the "captcha" technology hasn't been looked at from a user's standpoint.

For example, I don't mind the occasional captcha image during an account creation, or purchase. But to use it at every logon, or every posting of a message is ridiculous. At this point, you are putting your own welfare ahead of the user's interface experience. There are a number of sites that I am seriously considering *not* using due to this annoying technology.

Even if "captcha" technology was used sparingly and appropriately, it isn't perfect. When I used to work for a phone company, one of the first lessons that we learned was that we didn't use the letters I and O as references on schematics. Why? Because the letters I and O can respectively be mistaken for the numbers 1 and 0. Similarly, why the hell would anyone develop a captcha program that utlizes I, O, 1, 0, and the lowercase for "L"? If captcha wasn't annoying enough, now we get to submit it twice because we thought that the lowercase "L" that we were seeing was really a capital "i". Wise up, developers.

Then again, what do you expect from a group of people who came up with a new net technology term like "captcha"? I guess they were too wrapped up in making their new technology sound "hip" to consider actual usability.