Call PETA: Microsoft doing animal research!!!!
So I’m reading _Laughing Squid_ (which I love) and I see an article about the “Microsoft Research TechFest”:http://laughingsquid.com/microsoft-research-techfest-2007/ that just happened. I’m scrolling through all the pictures and what do I see:
OMG, Microsoft is keeping cats in cages and doing experiments on them! I always knew they were evil but this is beyond the pale!
Turns out this is really something much more innocuous and rather cool: the “Assira”:http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/ CAPTCHA solution.
Not only is it a clever idea, but it actually helps find homes for pets via a partnership with “petfinder.com”:http://www.petfinder.com/. Nicely done!
Shebanator 
uhm, you may not want to call PETA when you see animals in cages… a news search on the name “Adria Hinkle” starts to untease the story on what happened to over 14,000 strays after PETA said they’d find them homes.
(You’ll need to compare news stories to get what’s going on here… the accounts vary with the perspective of the speaker, but it’s remarkable it’s not a hotter issue in the commercial press.)
[Andrew says] I was kidding about the whole PETA thing. I’m not a fan of them or any other organization that takes extreme positions.