You're in the desert, you see a tortoise lying on its back, struggling, and you're not helping -- why is that?
We have all filled out online forms where one has to copy sometimes (purposely) hard to read letters from an image to confirm that one is not a robot (CAPTCHA). Microsoft offers an alternative called Asirra, which stands for "Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access." I thought this might be a joke at first, but apparently it is real and MS provides access to it and sample code to use it for free. You can get it here, and, perhaps more importantly, you can test to see if you are human.
Post title from here.
