Captcha is the worst, and Tickmaster's particular strain of the virus is especially, well, impossible. It's changing that, though, to a system that will hopefully be more friendly to actual people trying to use it.
Captcha is kind of necessary. It's to keep bots out, but it also keeps out normal human beings who can't decipher the deranged gorilla writing. So the new system Ticketmaster is going to, made by Solve Media, uses phrases, multiple choice questions, and ads, in regular font, to verify you're a human. It's cut the average time from 14 seconds on old captcha to seven seconds for the new system. It sounds pretty promising, unless all the "well known quotations" are made up of esoteric Seinfeld episodes. [BBC]