We're particularly grateful for your unfair characterisation of our paper as a reinvention of prior work. I very much enjoyed reading through the two references given in support of this argument -- despite neither one having much of anything to do with the technique you've supposedly been reviewing for the past 6 weeks.

Thank you also for claiming that our paper amounts to a bunch of code hacks and contains no theoretical contribution. Did you perchance miss the 2 pages of theorems and proofs we give in support of our work? I guess they're must have escaped your eagle eyes as you raced toward the conclusion. Just like the page and a half of results showing an order of magnitude improvement over the current state of the art. Clearly inconsequential next to the "large" 30% improvement yielded by your favourite technique -- which you went out of your way to point out to us.

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sigh

The above is obviously a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal, but I'd like to use it as a diving board into a more serious issue: namely that submitting papers to CS conferences is a crapshoot. I know I'm not alone when I say I've had bad reviews come back from obviously inexpert individuals who have failed to understand the basic problem at hand -- much less the contribution they're supposed to be opining on.

When submitting to a conference, I usually take the time to look at who is on the Program Comittee. If I see names I know I'm more likely to submit there. However, more often than not, paper reviewing gets farmed out by these genuine experts onto unwitting PhD students who are simply not yet in a position to offer up a fair assessment.

Which brings me to my question: what's the point of being a committee member if all you're going to do is shirk your responsibilities?