The dress is overexposed which moves the black to grey, and the blue has been desaturated, which leaves mostly yellowish hues like brown and gold behind.

Are there really 3 struggling to become the global leader though? From what I can see, there's Qi, which is widely supported by devices, and there's a couple of competing standards which don't want to die, occasionally announcing agreements with restaurant/cafe chains to put their unused charging devices into stores.

I've noticed this too. Many of the photos being spammed on my Facebook feed are cropped showing only the top 25% of the photo. In those photos, the light blue/gold shows up (with the light blue looking like bad white-balancing, so could easily be seen as white). But whenever the full picture is visible, the blue/black is more apparent, and when the bottom half of the dress is all that is visible, it definitely looks blue/black. Some of the people that have responded here saying they never see white/gold also stated that they have large monitors, so maybe they have never seen the image cropped, as it first appears on my relatively small laptop display on the buzzfeed site and others where I have to scroll down to see the full image.

Why should Google's developers be exempt from this, and allowed to cordon off .dev for themselves?

The black looks gold because the camera's auto white balance removed the blue. Simple as that.

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.