I wish the article had a little more analysis and technical detail. Anyone know what drives the competitiveness of electric buses vs other vehicles? What technology changes are changing this cost equation and how do they impact other vehicle markets?

Why are buses more competitive but cars aren't?

Is this about the ability to recapture energy when braking on electric vehicles? For buses used in cities stopping regularly, I could see this being a big deal.

Do form factor differences allowing better engineering decisions?

Does the high usage of buses make the fuel cost difference more dominant in the equation, making up for the higher capital costs? Would that mean that electric vehicles will come to dominate the taxi market too (until the taxi market is overwhelmed by self-driving vehicles)?

Sometimes https is needed to keep content confidential, but sometimes it is used just to ensure integrity. Some or all site content may be innocuous and not require confidentiality, but a man-in-the-middle corrupting data could change meaning or include malicious code. Maybe there should be an httpv -- http verified -- which includes signed hashes of each resource to offer proxy-friendly integrity and possibly lower overhead.

If you take out the ability of insurance companies to selectively deny coverage (which the ACA does), this ability to model outcomes can enable new more effective ways of paying doctors for care and hopefully improving outcomes. Given an expected outcome, an insurance company can pay for improving that outcome rather than just paying for every test run or treatment rendered.

I support research scientists and get similar requests. They have been using systems for 10-15 years and want to follow the same pattern, but the long delay between upgrades makes for much more violent changes when the upgrades do happen. We have to make great efforts to migrate files and workflows, and fight with them over every change.

One group decided that their system worked and they weren't going to mess around with it. Now they are scrounging ebay for backup VAX parts and scouring old spaghetti code every time anything needs to change, hoping that they don't break it all. The migration process to a new system has been painful, complicated, and expensive.

If you want a stable system, plan for incremental changes that keep up with the times. Buy reasonably priced equipment with a good backup solution, and you can just replace things as they fail or become obsolete. Instead of a really big capital outlay once, plan for a more moderate investment with recurring maintenance and upgrade costs.

Now would also be a good time to look at new commercial off the shelf software for managing a veterinary practice. It may be another significant investment, but it will (hopefully) give him long-term commercial support, and access to new features he doesn't get with his existing system.

Your father may not like that answer, but it is the only responsible one. With the ever-changing nature of computer systems, planning not to change or adapt is planning to fail.