So based on some customer feedback on a project I'm currently working on, I added a validation requiring that one of the dates be in the past. The validation is pretty straightforward:

After re-running the test suite though, I got a couple of failures. After digging into the code, it turns out that the following code snippit evaluates to true!

Of course this makes no sense. What's more is that I tried the code again while writing this blog post and now its false. So I did some digging into the Ruby internals and it turns out that Time is implemented in C in the following method:

The best I can come up with is that there's an problem with the GetTimeval method since its just a macro that pulls out some data from a time struct -- but the Date class is implemented in pure Ruby. Anyone come across this or can explain better?