Comment by toast0

> However, to lament programmers not eking out every megabyte of payload size is nonsensical - in my opinion. Why waste a scarce resource (labour hours) optimising the use of a cheap and plentiful resource (bandwidth/storage).

Bandwidth and storage are not always plentiful. I might have a lot of other things to store and not enough room for a half a gig deck of cards. And maybe my local tower is down and I've got an intermittent signal from the next one over.

> Imagine a world where fusion energy was the most commonly employed energy source and the cost of electricity in both environmental and economic terms was negligible. Should we still have energy-star rated refrigerators? Why? What purpose would it serve?

A more efficient fridge dumps less heat into the kitchen (or wherever), which means temperature fluctuation and more comfort, even if A/C is effectively free, it makes noise and what not. The other comment about environmental impact is also worth considering, although if energy is free and plentiful, I expect most power plants to switch and for syngas to takeover where liquid fuel still makes sense, which might make worrying about emissions obsolete (although who knows, anyway fusion seems capital intensive for the forseable future, so I'm not going to plan for free and plentiful energy)