Why the extra step to enter text from an image?

Spammers don't just send irritating and profane email nowadays, they've created programs that find forms and do horrible things, like:

• use the form to spam the form owner, or worse,
• overwrite the header lines in the form so they can submit any email they wish - effectively enslaving the server to send spam to tons of folks!

Please enter the text you see in the image because you're helping our server confirm that you're a real human being and not an automated computer program.

Thanks a heap for helping us cut down on the spam!