[promoCode]

...and why, pray tell, are they still providing turing tests to humans, if they already know who the humans are, you ask?

Well! Very obviously, any human can behave just as maliciously as a bot might! So captchas are there to slow us down. Point blank. They are flood control. They prevent spam, be it from bot or human.

The real question is, why would Ars Technica be so chicken-shit, that they can't come out and say that?

[tokenizerrr]

If you want to slow someone down you add in a delay. Like many forum software already does.