Is the 12-character CAPTCHA really necessary?

Surely in this age of modern computing, there must be some better solution available than a rediculous 12-digit CAPTCHA? That's a rhetorical question, I know for a fact that there are numerous better solutions. So the real question is why are you not using those solutions instead of this pain-in-the-butt system? I doubt that CAPTCHA would even phase a decent image recognition program, the numbers are not obscured in any way. Please, do everybody a favor and upgrade to something from the 21st century.