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Can you provide references? What is the basis of the spam/work to do? Maybe we could make their lives easier through creating a new tool, or better anti-spam measures.
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But lastly, there is a very important fact in captcha cracking you're missing. Human aided captcha cracking already exists. No matter how hard you make it for a computer to understand captchas there are already bots breaking captchas by sending the captcha back to some home server, giving the captcha to either a badly paid turk worker or tricking some person wanting to look at porn into solving the captcha, then sending the solution back to the bot and breaking through the captcha.
At this point "Pick the kitten" captchas will be less vulnerable than this proposal. (And even those can be broken with a human in the mix).
I agree that better tools and non captcha based tech are the way to go.
At a previously very-spammed company, we learned how no matter how badly you distort the captchas, it doesn't matter, as if it's human readable, humans can pick out the text. Look how cheap it is to get a human to do your captchas for the spammers! http://decaptchablog.com/decaptcher-services
Technical/social solutions such as helping the community patrol and catch spam and automated detection of spammy language are the way to go
Leslie
P.S. This is my own personal opinion and not the opinion of the foundation P.P.S. I also vote for any proposal which increases the number of kittens I get to view on a daily basis.
-- ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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