The study may or may not be flawed, but what's really interesting to me is the reaction. We need more science in our computer science, which means more experiments and more results like this. We should also be open to the truth that we use the tools we like because we like them rather than because they're technically superior, even though we pimp them ad nauseum as though they are.

I once read an article about a technique Intel had developed for improving cooling of processors by changing the shape of the fan. I related this to some of my co-workers. One of them proceeded to tell me that this can't possibly work, backing up his argument with "reasoning" based on off-the-cuff remarks about the way air and physics "must" work. The fact that Intel had actually done this seemed to have no effect on his eagerness to continue the "debate" about this scientific fact.

I have a hard time believing that I get no benefit from using Haskell over Smalltalk, but if a body of science were to appear that cast doubt on that belief, the appropriate thing to do is change the belief, not stand around debating from imagined first principles why all the science is wrong and can't be so. Shut up, design an experiment and go prove it!

Perhaps there's little of this kind of actual science in our computer science because it would mean asking hard questions and accepting difficult truths. "The prisoner falls in love with his chains."

Reminds me of a support call with Ruth in Idaho years ago. It didn't result in $4M, but it wasn't small potatoes either.

Like Bob, she was new to computers. I spent 10 hours over 2 days walking her thru the basics of using a computer so she could use our insurance company software. She was very thankful.

So thankful she sent me a box containing ... two giant Idaho potatoes, nearly a foot long each.

I said it wasn't small potatoes.

This opinion is both extraordinary and extremely significant. Richard Posner is probably the most prolific legal intellectual not on the supreme court. He co-writes, along with Gary Becker (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) this excellent blog http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Posner is the author of the 4th most cited Law Review article in the field of intellectual property law[1]. Most telling of all is this statistic: "As of 2000, Judge Posner was the most often-cited legal scholar of all time with 7,981 citations, nearly 50 percent more than anyone else" [2]. He retains that position in 2012.

[1] - William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, 18 J. Legal Stud. 325 (1989). [2] Fred Schapiro & Michelle Pearse, The Most Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, Michigan Law Review 2012.

(The author of the software wrote a comment here: "So you're just here to shit on things?", which he has since deleted.)

I genuinely and honestly cannot log into your Gandi account and fix your nameserver delegation, so that means I'm just here to shit on things? That's a logical leap for you? You are delegating xip.io to a nameserver that is refusing queries for your zone; that's seriously broken and can result in resolution failures, making your clever hack worthless.

I don't know why I bother providing feedback, since people from your school of thought (I'm looking at the 37signals community as a whole, here, which you're being a shining steward of) just get defensive and take your software being broken personally. You wrote a poor DNS server. Read the spec, study BIND's or NSD's source to understand the years of work that went into this before you, and understand the problems I've pointed out. I just get annoyed when people flagrantly misimplement DNS, because that starts trends, like Heroku suggesting for a long time that you use a CNAME for @ (don't do that).

I'm not making this up: http://i.imgur.com/zFNkV.png

Funny to see what a female thinks of as "wearing the same thing every day". For most dudes I know, That's a lot of clothes to own.

I think I made it to age 30 without ever owning 3 pairs of pants at one time.