Not bad, but lots of spam bots can OCR that since there isn't much randomness to throw them off. You need to add random colored lines and stuff. Here's a captcha I made 4-5 years ago:
So being new to a particular forum is how you judge intellect? RastaLulz knows what type of access I have to his server, maybe you'd like to ask him about that.
I disagree.
If you are the administrator of a server, you should be denying at the firewall level. If not, then as root you should be denying at the OS level. If you are not root, then you deny at the server level. Denying at the script level should be the last option...
It's not being removed. MySQLi is just going to be compiled with the STL in PHP 6. It will be a very long time before MySQL is removed as billions of websites use it.