HA HA HA! YOU FELL INTO MY TRAP!

Pardon my caps, but I set a lot of these, and they are rarely stepped in so beautifully. That's my fault, of course. But, here we go.

When you hear the name of a color, you think of some color which you associate with that, or a thing which you think of as being that color which actually has a whole texture, reflectivity, depth, etc. But the truth is that the same name is being used right now by a dozen different paint companies to describe a dozen different colors, which are then described in thousands of different ways by the downstream users of the paint. There are some absolute color standards based on elements, oxides of the same and the like, but even those are frequently "abused". The truth, though, is that outside of a small handful of colors, they are not defined by any unifying principle. Your use of the HTML standards is particularly hilariously perfect, I really hope that you meant to put your foot there! Outside of web design, nobody but nobody gives a crap about that. Before that, we had the X rgb.txt file, which nobody outside of X-land cared about, which begat HTML colors by the way, junior. But meanwhile, over in the land of professional color, there were multiple competing color standards including AGFA and Pantone — and there still are.

It's interesting that part of this debate is also over the color "black" because "black" is what you see when you don't see anything, and if any part of the dress were truly black then the photograph would look like an editing mistake. Even the color black is subjective. That should be intuitively obvious to a web designer (who else would even mention HTML colors?) who has to deal with the real-world effects of differing black and white levels all day. I may be sitting at a monitor with 120% color (Adobe gamma) but I don't expect other people to have them. As far as I know, there is no color correction e.g. for Android which is not manual, and then the color adjustments become utterly perceptual.

I suspect that celebs are adept at perceiving the actual color of the dress because they have appeared in so many washed-out photographs.

Are you kidding? It's possible to be balanced far more towards blue. But also, gold is not a color. I learned back in my Amiga-using, pixel-editing days that there's a lot of blue in most metallics. I don't know if that's an artifact of what happens to light when it bounces off of them, or what, sorry. Not a physicist. But I know that if you're trying to make something look metallic, you're going to be adding some blue to it.

No, no I don't.

I do remember hearing about CO2 forcing in elementary school, though.

Just think about all the fun stuff that will get lifted out of the soil and carried into the oceans when that happens!

Not only (as others have pointed out) did we not stop at two, but setting off nuclear bombs is just a thing you can decide not to do. We may well be past the point of climate runaway, and if that's so then we would have to engage in concerted effort to prevent the imminent demise of the relative condition of biostasis we've enjoyed all the time.

Or hell, maybe the next ice age cycle will solve the problem, through some as-yet-unimagined mechanism. The question then becomes whether we'll survive that.

The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white and gold, or at least grey and gold. Load it up in an editor and snip pieces of it out if you don't believe me, look at them on their own, compare them to color swatches. That doesn't make the dress any particular color. It makes the picture a particular color. The "white"/"black" part is banging right around 50%, which is clearly neither white nor black.

The camera diddled the image, maybe it was diddled even more before we actually saw it. Then we're all amazed that it doesn't look like the thing. But people have accidentally been taking pictures of things which don't look like things since time immemorial. They're called shitty pictures.

Is it in fact the same photo again? Or was it messed with again?

No, we know what needs to be done, we don't know how to force people to do it. And it very much takes force. The people whining about it seem to forget that this is how the world works. People with different ideas eventually come to blows because in the real world you can't do both things.

When I see stuff like that, my brain corrects the image for me.

Are people who are seeing this dress as weird colors just defective?

(I'm defective in other ways, like a lack of modesty, and some respiratory issues, let's not get all twisted here)

I shall have to use telegraph code. The symbols I shall utilize are dots and pipes. Ready? Here we go: ..|..

Microsoft is not likely to bother with another Windows 7 service pack. They are getting ready to bring out a whole other operating system, and give it away for free to the customers who would have downloaded such a thing.

I've seen WL222, but I haven't heard of IR5.

You'd like to think so, but it seems to me like most video games are pretty bad on every platform.

I dunno, I haven't come up with a clear answer to that yet. But it's not going to happen now, absent a general recession to match, since video gaming is now a real thing.

root on ZFS is a thing now. ZFS has a lot of benefits that I'd like to be using, if it were easier. (It's not that big a deal overall, but I don't want to have to do a lot of extensive fiddling when something fails.)