There’s been a lot of people disparaging our athletes, saying Canada’s Own The Podium program has been a failure. Some of the athletes have responded, saying that it works.

Fourteen gold medals — the highest count for a host country in the Winter games. Ever.

I think it works.

Congratulations Team Canada!!!

Gather ’round, boys and girls, for I am going to tell you the story of the CAPTCHAs. Once upon a time, the Internet was a wonderful place, full of intelligent people, and useful sources of information. People could have serious conversations in public forums and everything was good.

Then came things like AOL and the Freenets came along and suddenly this wonderful place started filling up with not-so-intelligent people. The useful sources of information became less useful as ads started to appearing in the middle of the conversation threads because some people thought it was acceptable to post their ads wherever they went. Some even went so far as to create programs that surfed the web and automatically posted their ads wherever they went.

The intelligent people who ran the sites didn’t like this, so they started coming up with ways to confirm that the messages being posted in conversations were being written by people and not ‘bots.

And thus the CAPTCHAs were born.

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