This is the summary I was looking for. Good work.

Those operators are merely symbols that represent a subset of things they can do in the "real world". Why not allow them to represent a bigger subset of those things that they can do in the real world?

Good point.

The difference is that it's immediately obvious what a return statement is doing whereas the goto puts the flow of code "elsewhere" and might be leaving things in a weird state (granted that the OP has since claimed he intended to put some cleanup code before his return which could change the circumstances).

Not even just for error conditions. I think something like "if(x==NULL)return EMPTYSTRING;" at the beginning of a function for special case handling is very readable.

OK. So now why is white better than blue? Or, indeed, the IR that was once fairly common in phones in the late 90s?

Oh, I see. They want to use the room lighting to do this? Seems like a solution looking for a problem to me.

XP had more demanding specs which was adopted pushed the netbooks out of their value point (they failed to be competitive with low-end laptops).

Tablets vs netbooks is yet to be decided. Tablet sales are flattening and Chromebooks are still out there.

Did that chafe when you pulled it out of your arse?

I don't believe he said that Windows 7 killed the notebook, merely that Microsoft's efforts to take a slice of the pie were damaging to the market

You are completely right. I still use my EEEpc. Though more often I use my Chromebook which has more modern specs and a better for factor (not reflashed though. For advanced features, remoting works well for my needs).

The sibling post of mine notes that you can effectively get a netbook by having a tablet and adding a keyboard. Sorry, I like my keyboard pre-attached. I do have a tablet but it has mostly fallen to being used as a remote control for mythtv and for my daughter to track her yu-gi-oh games. My chromebook is in constant use when I'm not at my main desktop.

You would think that the people selling the stuff would have an interest in proving these things were effective (perhaps via an industry association).

If they were effective.

It'll be the same old rules: If you can keep it, it's yours.

Anything you'd need to learn to do something useful with a Pi with Windows, would not be too far from what you'd need to learn to do the same with Linux.

The netbook thing was an "Embrace, extend extinguish" kind of deal. It ruined the market.

His driver hit a patch of ice and drove the limo into a snow bank.