Genius indeed. The Captcha thing is misrepresented though. It does not use the time wasted to digitize books because you are still typing the one word that doesn't do anything. So the plan requires everyone to double the amount of time they spend typing Captchas (and if you're like me, you have to refresh a few times before you can even read the both words).
I agree! He felt guilty wasting our time with nonsense, so now he's wasting even more time!
For the record, with recaptcha's, the word that's really warbled with black behind it - is the word that the computer knows. The other one is the one from a book they're decoding. If you type the one with black background, and leave out the other word (or type gibberish), your captcha is accepted (because the computer has no clue what this word actually says!). Don't feel guilty about messing up their books because they anyways run the word by a bunch of other 'testers'!
