I profoundly dislike the captchas. Since I have to be signed into my pragprog account to post, what is the point of having the captchas? Am I not supposed to be an authenticated user already? Was there a spam problem in the forums, and this is why the captchas were added?
Plus I agree with Bob that they are very often hard to make out correctly. I would strongly vote for getting rid of them if at all possible.