I thought so, too, on the first read. Turns out only one of them was. The other was just confusing as heck. The first one was the vacation sentence, which I commented on earlier. The other one was this one:

Which is a terrible sentence, but not run-on. It's bad because "of all sorts" breaks the flow. It should be rewritten as "I grow all sorts of berries, lemons, limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden," or "I grow all sorts of berries, lemons and limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden," if you have some strange desire to make "lemons and limes" a thing.

It's also unlikely that you grow lemons and limes in a garden. It would prevent the other plants from getting light. That's more an orchard thing. So "in my garden" doesn't seem to connect to that part of the sentence.

I would go with "I grow radishes and lettuce in my garden, along with lemons, limes, and berries of all sorts." Now you have something readable, and it doesn't strongly imply that the trees and bushes are in the garden.

They were trying to show that semicolons shouldn't be used to separate lists that don't have commas in it, but to be honest, my immediate reaction was to assume that if they had already done something as abhorrent as a semicolon before a coordinating conjunction, they probably were expecting something nonstandard like semicolons around phrases with "and". :-)

Either way, that sentence was so irredeemably bad that the comma versus semicolon question wouldn't even get asked. In general, if you're having to ask whether to use a semicolon in place of a comma, you have already failed to write a coherent sentence, and you're just doing damage control. Go back and rewrite the sentence.

In one of those, I would argue that the MLA style is wrong. Question four was a painfully long sentence. They suggest using a semicolon before the coordinating conjunction. Nope. The sentence overused commas where em dashes are more appropriate. They considered this to be correct:

If I had read a sentence like that in a book, I would have set the book on fire long before I got to the point of seeing whether the author used a comma or a semicolon before the coordinating conjunction. So for question 4, the correct answer is "neither".

The problem with their use of semicolon is that "but, to her surprise" is not really related to "she was only taking a few days off", making a semicolon joining inappropriate. The author wasn't trying to say, "She was only taking a few days off, but to her surprise, she managed to fit everything in." Rather, what was actually meant was that "She thought she wouldn't have time for all three activities, but, to her surprise, she managed to fit everything in." The "she was only taking a few days off" was basically a parenthetical assigning a reason for why she thought she wouldn't have enough time.

A much better punctuation is this:

By using em dashes (or parentheses if you prefer) to set off a parenthetical clause instead of commas, the sentence becomes eminently more readable/parseable.

So no semicolons before coordinating conjunctions, please. If you ever get to the point where you're about to add a semicolon before a coordinating conjunction because the first part of the sentence is too long or complex, the first part of the sentence is too long or complex. Find another way to say it.

For example, I would suggest reordering it, dropping the "although", and splitting it into multiple sentences:

And boom. You've just taken a sentence that is painful to read and turned it into a third-grade-reading-level sentence.

But that's just my opinion; it's not the first time I've disagreed with MLA on things, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

It's way worse than that.

• Small fish grow into big fish. Without the small companies getting bigger and eventually buying your high-end packages, why would anyone switch from somebody else's software over to your high-end packages? No. They'll find a way to work within the limitations of whatever they were using before rather than deal with the pain of the migratino. So now you don't have feeders, and as big companies die, they don't get replaced. The very thing that keeps your big fish from leaving now prevents you from acquiring new big fish.
• When growing companies run into the limitations of the other technologies, they push those other technologies to find solutions, and now the other solutions can do everything that your high-end packages can do, but they're not you. I think this part is what you were describing.
• The other vendors provide competition, and likely undercut your high-end packages. Companies start to switch, and now you start losing revenue. So you cut costs to match. And they cut costs further. And you end up in a race to the bottom with the dozen companies that evolved to fill the gap left behind by your company's mismanagement.

So this behavior is very short-sighted and stupid, in my opinion. But if they want to crater their business, that's up to them.

The problem is that there's no such thing as a captive big fish. The biggest companies might be captive in the short term, but they also can throw money at the problem and make it a short-term problem. The bigger the dollar amount, the more they'll be willing to spend to move away from an extortionate vendor. There's really nothing that they do that other companies can't do.

Also, the whole point of VMWare is to save money off of buying the hardware. If the price gets high enough that it's cheaper to just buy the hardware, what's the point of using it at all?

That said, Broadcom only has to make $61 billion off of VMWare for that to not be a loss on their balance sheets, and is earning just shy of $4 billion per quarter, so even if they only keep most of those fish for four years, when the last sucker leaves, they can shut the whole thing down and still probably be slightly ahead.

In theory, nothing stops someone from writing a FireWire Audio PCI driver using PCIDriverKit and AudioDriverKit, but I'm pretty sure nobody is going to do it unless I magically find myself with a lot more free time. You'd have to start by writing a FireWire OHCI card driver, and then write the drivers for the actual devices on top of that. It would be a huge pain in the you-know-what.

It would be easier, in all likelihood, to just keep Apple's (open source) FireWire drivers working, so long as they don't rip out any critical hooks in xnu, with obvious caveats about probably having to disable SIP.

Sorry, thanks for playing. Apple supported FireWire even in current Macs using the Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter (though you also need a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter on any Macs built from 2016 onwards). I used multiple MOTU FireWire audio interfaces with my M1 Mac (still running Sonoma) just a couple of months ago.

Apple also supports FireWire PCIe cards in all versions of the Mac Pro, and in Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures attached to any Mac.

Yes, this impacts people. No, Apple doesn't care about pro audio folks. They demonstrated that long ago, and keep doing so over and over again.

Not really, no. The iPod stopped supporting FireWire data transfers with the iPod nano (2005) and the fifth-generation classic (2005). They continued supporting FireWire charging up through the original iPhone (2007), and phased it out beginning in 2008, a full four years before they dropped the 30-pin connector.

Everybody who still has FireWire audio interfaces. I've been trying to get MOTU hardware to go from large quantities of ADAT inputs to AVB for almost a year now, and the hardware is completely unobtainable. I will not be able to move to Tahoe for the foreseeable future because of this.

Yup. This right here is why I don't own an iPad, even though I own an iPhone, a Mac, and a Vision Pro. My only tablet (other than a first-gen iPad Mini that we all got for free when they first came out) is a cheap Kindle Fire 7-inch that I use for watching Netflix when I'm in the middle of something at night and don't want to stop to take a shower. Oh, and a 21.5-inch Android tablet that I use as an electronic music stand for my electronic organ, but that's a tablet in roughly the same way that an iMac is a tablet. :-D

If I could actually use an iPad to do everything I can do on my Mac, even if it weren't as good at it, I would own one, because you can use an iPad during takeoff and landing on an airplane, which would be at least two extra hours of getting stuff done every trip across the country, and that adds up. It would take an extra couple of minutes to transfer files across, but it would be worth the extra couple of minutes to be able to effectively have my Mac for an entire flight.

But as long as the iPad is a toy that can only run about 15% of the software that I use on my Mac (and only the 15% that is least useful in that environment, such as Safari), the entire product line is useless to me.

Apple is leaving money on the table with that decision. Craig, please think back to when Steve said that a company that doesn't cannibalize itself will get cannibalized by other companies, and take that to heart.

But even more useful would be a proper USB-C port and Mac app support on Vision Pro.

California and Washington have constructive discharge/dismissal laws, too, FYI, and I suspect most other states do as well.

More than a dick move, unless your employment contract explicitly allows the company to force you to relocate or specifies that your work location is at a particular location, forcing you to move is a violation of your employment contract, and potentially illegal.

No one who is getting these notices should do anything without consulting two lawyers — one in their state of residence and one in Seattle, because in the event of any conflict of law, the weaker party may be favored regardless of any contract terms to the contrary, and you are by far the weaker party compared with such a large employer.

Always was. Any illusion of workers having any actual bargaining power in the employee-employer relationship is just that — an illusion. When you have a multi-billion-dollar company with 1.5 million employees, do you think they actually ever cared about losing a few? This fundamental imbalance is why most countries have strong laws to protect employees from abusive employers. Give it a little time, and Washington will pass laws in response to this, and Amazon will begin to regret their short-sightedness, having made all future layoffs harder by being too greedy during this one.

That said, in this case, the employees still have a choice not to cede even more power to the employer unnecessarily. Amazon cannot force anyone to come back to the office. This isn't a totalitarian regime where secret police can drag you out of your bed at night at the behest of a company. You have a choice whether to return or not, and if you do not, they have a choice about whether to fire you or not. It's as simple as that.

If a large enough number of people refuse their false choice (resign or move back), they might relent. And if they don't, then you're still no worse off for having made that choice. After all, resigning with no severance provides you with absolutely no benefit other than a mostly theoretical opportunity to go back to Amazon in the future. Realistically, there's no reason to believe that they'll ever hire you without you moving back, so if you're not willing to move back, then there's exactly zero reason not to just let them fire you for refusing the forced location transfer.

Furthermore, if you were hired remotely originally, then you have a strong wrongful termination claim, because forcing you into the office is at least arguably constructive dismissal. (Yes, I realize Canadian law doesn't provide precedent for Washington State, but similar principles exist here in the U.S.)

And either way, if they fire you, you will likely be eligible for unemployment, which is free money. Amazon has to pay into that fund, and if they fire a large enough number of people, their unemployment insurance costs will skyrocket, so you'll be actively punishing Amazon by refusing to leave voluntarily.

So unless you're seriously thinking about moving back and working there in person, either immediately or in the future, there is absolutely no rational reason why anyone in their right minds would resign. Let them fire you, then file for unemployment and trash them on Glassdoor. That approach does the most damage to Amazon, both financially and reputationally, and it also maximizes your income. It's a win-win. Even better, when you tell your next employer why you left your previous company, you'll immediately know whether they are decent human beings. If they reject you because of it, you'll know that you don't want to work for them.

Where is the evidence that this was the case, though? When the U.S. has something like that happen, there's a formal inquiry, there's a public documentation trail showing why the actions were taken, and the consensus is that they made the right call more often than not. We're not seeing that from Israel, or if we are, it isn't being reported, and that's disconcerting, particularly given the rate of these incidents.

Hiding among civilians is not the same thing as using protected sites to run operations. One person in Hamas living in an apartment building with his/her family is not equivalent to storing vast quantities of weapons and munitions in a protected location, which is what that exception was intended to allow.

Blowing up schools with children inside is never okay. Blowing up hospitals with patients still inside is never okay. Giving them enough warning to get innocent people out is an absolute minimum standard of human decency, and failing to do that means that you're deliberately targeting civilians, hence a war crime.

The Netanyahu government can hide behind pedantic interpretations of international law all they want to, but when you look at the big picture, you don't rack up a 10:1 civilian to militant kill ratio if you're operating within the bounds of international law. There's just no way. Typical U.S. wars were less than 1:1 (ignoring any indirect deaths, which are hard to compare). And no U.S. war has ever deliberately prevented aid from getting to the innocent victims of that war. The things that the Israeli government has done are, IMO, nothing short of unconscionable. It isn't just a few incidents; it's a clear pattern of lack of concern for innocent human lives, repeated almost daily.

At this point, the U.N. commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel's actions are clear war crimes and that the intent is tantamount to genocide. There's really no defending the Israeli government's actions. They went way, WAY too far on way, WAY too many occasions to give them the benefit of the doubt. And regardless of what happens with Iran — and mind you, going after Iran's government for their proxy war against Israel is at least arguably a legitimate military action — I think it is still critical to hold the Netanyahu government accountable for war crimes committed in fighting this war, if only to serve as a deterrent to electing similar governments in the future.

Oh, I'm sure the sentiment is real. Popularity of the current government officially hovers around 50%, with a significant minority very much in favor of setting the whole government on fire (but also a not-small minority that wants to keep the status quo, and they have the guns and soldiers).

What I'm questioning is whether they're angry enough to do something about it and powerful enough to take on the entrenched power structure. After all, those sorts of mass protests in authoritarian countries tend to paint targets on the chests of the participants — in some cases, in a very literal sense (with laser scopes). And more often than not, the power vacuum gets filled with something worse, or with something so weak that it quickly topples in favor of something remarkably similar to the government that was previously in power.

But maybe this time will be different. One can only hope.