I have heard of WOW playing geek pornstar, but I don’t think I have ever heard of a pornstar programmer.

Here is a look at 10 Captchas that are going a bit too far to verify you as a human.

1) Only people with a good understand of Math may apply.

2) You have to be a sociopath to type that in.

3) Eyestrain Captcha.

4) Dyslexics need not apply.

5) I don’t even…

6) Great way to make you a premium user in 29 seconds.

7) Membership for blind internet users.

8) No human or robot can solve that one.

9) I thought beauty is in the eye of the beholder

10) Captcha from hell.

Such an open access point could be a trap set up by a knowledgeable person with bad intentions, with proper tools they can not only log all your online activities but can also gain access to your email, bank or financial website information that you access to using their internet connection. A smart and capable hacker can hijack your session when you are connected to your bank or email account without actually having username and password for your account. For some sites without proper security measures username and password can be viewed in plain text using a sniffer, as shown below.

In the above demonstration as you can see with the correct tools (in this Cane and Abel) anyone can sniff out critical access informations to websites you visit. Please note that the above example  is just a demonstration and banks usually don’t pass plaintext username and password like shown here.

To protect yourself, avoid connecting to open Wi-Fi access point, whether you know the source or not. If you absolutely have to connect to an open relay, try to avoid logging to password protected websites.

While I am not as (financially) successful as some of geek drop-outs who inspired me. I have done better (financially) than most of my friends who did graduate from the same college I dropped out from and most importantly I enjoy what I do. Do you need to graduate from a college in order to be successful in life? If you can open a book and read, there is absolutely no reason why you can’t have the same knowledge you will get by graduating from a college. The only difference is a piece of paper that will cost you ~50-100k (if in US) and 4 years of your life.

Ok maybe its a bit simplistic view against college but its not very far from the truth. When I dropped out of college I constantly needed inspiration from success stories of geeks who made it big but never finished college. These are the five successful geek personnel who inspired me the most:

1) Michael Saul Dell:

Geek Creed: When he was 15 he used to take apart Apple II computers and rebuild it just for the hell of it. He dropped out of University of Texas to run PC’s Limited (now Dell) at the age of 19.

2) Steve Jobs:

Geek Creed: Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak – NeXT Computer – Pixar Animation. Dropped out of Reed College only after one semester.

3) Bill Gates:

Geek Creed: Best known for Microsoft. Dropped out of Harvard to start a software company with Paul Allen. After more than 30 years, Microsoft is still one of the largest software companies in the world.

4) Paul Allen:

Geek Creed: Paul Allen was the other half of Microsoft with Bill Gates the same way Steve Wozniak was a partner with Jobs on Apple. He dropped out of Washington State University to work as a programmer.

5) John Carmack:

Geek Creed: Cofounder of id Software and lead programmer of famous games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Doom. He dropped out of University of Missouri only after 2 years to work as a freelance programmer.

Final Words:

You don’t necessarily have to be a (computer) geek to drop out of college and make it big. There are many successful and famous people who made it big without ever getting a college degree. Yes, some of them got lucky but most of them took proactive steps that put them in the right place at the right time and you don’t need 4 years and a lifetime worth of loans to be there.