You actually need the overexposed background there to fool your brain into thinking the dress is underexposed to see the blue as white, and the black as gold.

Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.

Which makes me curious - which pair of colours are the two dresses in the xkcd comic to you?

The black is the bit that looks "gold". The "white" part is actually blue. Once I realised that the oversaturated light source behind was a reflection of the flash in a mirror (you can see more evidence of flash reflection on the dress itself), and not the sun shining through a window, my brain started processing the image totally differently, and I can no longer see it as white and gold unless I scroll the image so I can only see the top 20%.

It depends

1. on the angle you are looking at the screen (on a phone, from the side, or a laptop tilting your screen back further, it definitely looks black and blue, straight on, see the other factors below).
2. whether you see the top of it first and scroll down to the rest of the image, or you see the bottom first and scroll up (I think because the top neck area is definitely gold, but the colors of the dress in the photo definitely have a blue tinge to them)
3. whether you perceive the light source behind as a window or a mirror (your brain adjusts the white balance of the dress accordingly)

Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.

I'm calling it unreadable mess. (the bottom line of most posts, specifically).

It's a bugger when the species you genetically engineered to solve complex mathematical equations starts experimenting on your brain.

Didn't you get the memo. You're supposed to be shilling for Windows 8 now, not Windows 7.

Luxury! We had to suck our uuencoded multipart Usenet posts from the server byte by byte through a straw. It took weeks to get all the parts together so they could be decoded on a slide rule and punched into a card by hand using a blunt nail and a screwdriver as a hammer.

You're probably still stuck at step 1. Another problem with Windows 7 is that it seems to take forever just to open an Explorer window compared with earlier versions of Windows. I've seen the behaviour described in the GP a few times in the last couple of weeks. I'd never seen it before that though, so maybe its a recent Patch Tuesday bonus.

Our continent has had a rich history of cultures and languages, perhaps the most diverse in human history!

Not to belittle the great diversity of language on the American continent, but sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia, especially India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are significantly more diverse lingustically even than Bolivia (the most lingustically diverse country in the Americas).

given how war-torn their two countries are

You mean the Irish come from both Eurasia and Oceania?

You're unlikely to get robbed in a drug neighborhood, for example, because most people either don't have anything to steal, or have a weapon, or will fight to the death over their last $2.

There's also the fact that the gang that controls distribution has no interest in increased police presence on their turf, so they tend to keep petty street crime under control.

So the freedom of speech of the terrorists who made those videos trumps the right to privacy of the families of the victims now?

America has become very screwed up since 9/11 in more ways than one.

I remember reading a few years ago that in one of the south-east Asian cities (Kuala Lumpur maybe? Singapore?) there was two-tier pricing on electricity -- dirt cheap up to X kWh so that everyone could have lighting and basic usage

In Malaysia there are 5 tiers for electricity pricing (until recently it was 9), and if your total bill for the month comes to less than RM20 (around USD 7), the government covers it.