Maybe my understanding is off, but wouldn't the US government be the perfect entity to write encyclopedia article given that they are the primary source in the scope of their job?
Nope. It would be fine for an article to cite such an official, but to have them actually doing the writing is stomping all over the independence of the press. Government officials have a deep conflict of interest in reporting about subjects they are directly involved in.
I've always been fascinated by the the VOA. The vast majority of Americans are completely clueless that the US has government media, because the VOA is strictly restricted from intentionally broadcasting to US citizens. Even though the VOA is established as an independent agency, without direct government control, legislators were highly concerned that even that indirect control would be far too tempting, and the VOA would be turned into a voice of propaganda. The design has been highly effective, and despite being controlled by the US government, it has been a commonly trusted source of unbiased news (for the rest of the world) for about half a century now.
The moral of the story being, there's little justification for authorities having a say in media reports about their own actions. They have enough authority without being able to dictate the terms on which the public is informed.
The only real candidate that I'm aware of is H.261, which takes roughly 10x the bandwidth of Theora to deliver anything close to the same quality at typical web streaming sizes.
First off, MPEG-1 is no longer patent restricted, and is newer and better than h.261.
Second, 10X is clearly a made-up number. Through the past 20+ years of lossy video compression, there hasn't been an order of magnitude improvement in compression at all. And even if there had been such an improvement, Theora certainly wouldn't be the codec in a position to do it, as it's pretty poor quality. If you're really seeing that huge of a difference, you're doing something HORRIBLY wrong.
I have tried h.261 even though support for it is pretty flaky, and I use MPEG-1 EXTENSIVELY today (on SVCDs and DVDs, in lieu of MPEG-2). I've got a video encoding to MPEG-1 right now... I would put libavcodec's MPEG-1 up against Theora any day. If nothing else, the quality is quite close, and MPEG-1 requires a tiny fraction of the CPU power to encoder or decode.
That's only according to some guy from Nokia, who clearly has a massive bias.
No one actually knows what the patent status is
On2 had sold VP3 licenses for years, as well as for newer versions (VP4/5/6/7) based on many of the same methods as VP3. Those codecs have long been licensed, and widely used by very large companies like AOL (Nullsoft TV, AIM Video), Macromedia, Adobe (Flash v7), BBC (QuickLink field broadcasts), eBay (Skype Video), and no doubt many many more. The fact that no patent trolls have come out of the woodwork yet is pretty damn strong evidence that Theora is in the clear.
No one even uses Theora for anything
That's pretty much how all video codecs start out... Theora is still in beta, yet there is quite a bit of content from sites such as http://v2v.cc/
Why do we need video requirements for text markup?
For the same reason we need image requirements for text markup. In fact HTML already has a specified video format: raw MJPEG, it just happens to suck.
I long wished MPEG-1 had been specified for web video (to supersede MJPEG) when it's patents had first expired, but it never happened, no doubt because some many companies have vested interests in getting those patent license fees.
Dolby Labs does the same thing whenever a video standard is being defined... they throw a good amount of money in bribes around, and make sure the standards (in all those countries that have software patents) include only Dolby, despite MP2/Musicam being as good, and trivially easy to include as an alternative. So while our European friends can put free MP2 audio on their DVDs, and in their DTV broadcasts, in the US we are absolutely required to have a Dolby Digital/AC3 audio track.
Theora is substantially better than any other codec which has a chance of being included.
Now that is an extremely contentious claim to make, and yet you state your opinion as fact, and do so with an utter and complete lack of evidence of any kind to support it...
Most US nuclear weapons were designed using computers under 1 MIPS.
Yes, but faster computers hold the potential for reducing the astronomical development (and testing) costs. I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to built a cluster of PCs than it is to vaporize a Pacific island nation.
The silly thing about export controls on computers is that the U.S. Government keeps increasing the control threshold for "supercomputers".
Well, that really doesn't apply to Iran, as you're practically not allowed to export anything to them. And as for other (friendly) countries, I imagine it's just to keep the US a few years ahead of the rest of the world in brute-forcing crypo, advanced cruise missiles, etc. not entirely preventing bomb and missile development.
Why Iran is not (apparently) allowed to have nuclear energy,
Actually, they turned down an arrangement to get nuclear material from Russia, so that they could
or high powered computers? Have they ever detonated a computer guided nuclear weapon in someone else's country?
The idea behind sanctions is to enact them before that can happen, ideal to prevent them the opportunity...
As for the reasons sanctions have been imposed... Do you make a habit out of asking others to answer questions you could very quickly find the answer to, on your own?
Had Cell Service (with AT&T/Cingular) for about 3 hours following the outage [...] but apparently the cell-site UPS batteries drained and the tower site did not have a generator...
This FCC rule only requires towers have 8 hour capacity anyhow, so you're only going to see at most 3X the run time over your current situation.
The article talks a lot about diesel generators--nothing about natural gas generators, solar cells, wind turbines, etc.--so you can pretty safely assume cell towers will have just enough fuel to run for 8 hours before shutting down, and remain that way until power is restored.
H 261 and MPEG-1 video codec are one in the same, FYI.
By all means, prove it. Or at least try to. I'd really like to know where you got the idea that they are identical. I have not seen a single source that equates the two. In fact most specifically state that MPEG-1 was a later effort.
libavcodec has entirely separate encoders and decoders for MPEG-1 and h.261. A quick look through the code suggest they are significantly different, for example with h.261 containing a loop filter, but apparently not supporting trellis quantization.
You make the assumption that he has spare time in which to work another job.
In which case, he very likely wouldn't be posting on slashdot, wouldn't be spending precious time ripping all his CDs, and wouldn't be shopping around for a portable player.
I would like to see an unencumbered standard CODEC that all browsers support, that does not necessarily have to be Ogg if MPEG2 and AC3 are due to expire in the near future.
MPEG-2 is horrible at low bitrates, and needs very, very high bitrates to get good quality... far higher than MPEG-4 ASP or h.264. I can't see anyone ever using it for web video. Though, with that said, MPEG-2 is fully backwards compatible, so even if MPEG-2 is the standard, everyone can transparently use MPEG-1 instead.
MPEG-1 however, does very well at low bitrates, and all patents have long expired. MPEG-1 also comes with patent-free MP2 audio, which is easily on-par with AC3.
That Nokia instead suggest the older, less capable, and lower quality h.261 seems highly suspect.
That entire scenario would have gone quite differently if charging stations started appearing all over. Major airports tend to have several spots for electric vehicles. If major Hospitals did as well, you'd have wasted just a few seconds, instead, swiping a credit card, and plugging your car in.
Have you ever had an out-of-state relative suddenly deathly ill? Have you ever had to drive two states away to work on a customer's problem or some remote hardware on a network unexpectedly?
No doubt you're on the east coast of the US, or someplace similar. Out here in the west, it's not an issue... Two states away is a full day of non-stop highway driving, many times beyond the reach of current electric vehicles.
Large cities, or even any cities at all, are few and very far between, so if there's any out-of-state emergency, you really need a plane ticket anyhow. Even in-state, you're either very close (Los Angeles to San Diego) or very, very far away (Los Angeles to San Francisco) and requiring a non-electric vehicle, if not a quick airline hop.
On Video, I wouldn't claim H. 261 as capable nearly enough of competing with the MPEG-4 generation at low bitrates.
I have no experience with h.261. I did not mentioned it, but rather MPEG-1.
If two video content sites provided the same content over the same bandwith, one encoding with MPEG-1 and the other with MPEG-4, the difference would be glaringly obvious in favor of the one using MPEG-4 codecs.
On the contrary. I've compared the two extensively, and MPEG-1 still does a damn good job at low bitrates, and can be quite competitive with MPEG-4 ASP codecs like Divx/Xvid/FMP4.
h.264 AVC is NOT a widely used format! It is only used on iPods and some other devices like cellphones (3gp).
Pretty much all of Apple's products... iPods and AppleTV plays h.264 (as well as many other portable video players), Quicktime has encoded to h.264 for a long time now, and so all of the trailers available on apple.com are in h.264 format. Any site providing "Quicktime" compatible files are probably using h.264. It's certainly not a significant percentage of online videos, though.
It's used heavily in gaming because of the ultra high nearly lossless compression.
It's used in gaming because they don't want to pay patent fees. That's it.
"Nearly lossless" is a contradiction in terms. And furthermore, it's terribly inaccurate. Vorbis isn't significantly better than any of the other modern codecs out there. AAC, for instance, is probably better. And if you really want an amazing audio codec, try Musepack, it blows Vorbis and everything else away, while taking far less CPU power to encode or decode than even MP3.
On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs,
No. MPEG-4 ASP has NOTHING to do with h.263. It's a completely different codec.
h.264/MPEG-4 Part10 AVC, is a rare coincidence, where the ITU's and MPEG's efforts happened to coincide, so they both worked together, and standardized on the same codec.
On2 donated Theora to Xiph to use with Ogg, and Xiph published it as an open specification. However, Microsoft basically did the same thing: it published WMV with the SMPTE group as an "open standard" called VC1.
VC-1 is open, but NOT royalty free, completely unlike On2's VP3/Theora.
It's easier to describe both as failed proprietary technologies that nobody uses, although Microsoft is pushing VC1 hard in HD-DVD and in Windows Vista.
WMV9/VC-1 is probably the most wildly successful proprietary video codec ever. It is the most popular format for online videos, and has been for years. Flash is merely biting at it's heels now, and a long way from surpassing VC-1.
This is not a case of OpenDocument vs MS-XML, open vs closed.
On the contrary, that's almost EXACTLY what it is. Microsoft is submitting their XML format for standarization, as they did with VC-1, but it's not going to be free of patent licensing fees, while OpenDocument format is.
Having wide support behind one good, open portfolio of standards will make it easier for FOSS to compete with and participate in the desktop computing world.
No, it will make it nearly impossible, as FOSS projects can't pay the licensing fees associated with h.264/AAC/MP4. That's the reason why support is behind the 100% free Theora format instead.
According to the paper Theora is comparable in performance to the old H.261 codec. H.261 is about 20 years old so all patents on it have most likely expired.
It seems very strange that they would suggest h.261, and not MPEG-1, which is newer, but also more than old enough to be completely patent-free.
I don't know much about h.261 (I don't think I've EVER heard anyone mention it until reading this paper), but the first thing I've found out is that it's extremely restricted... You really are only allowed to have a resolution of 320x288. That's extremely crippling for us NTSC folks, and also for anyone who wants higher quality/resolution video than youtube, or just odd dimentions (due to cropping), widescreen, etc. It also doesn't seem to support numerous quality improving options that MPEG-1 does, such as trellis, macroblocks types, higher precision motion vectors, etc.
So again, I have to wonder aloud why they're recommending h.261 instead of MPEG-1. Are they really being that flagrant in trying to sabotage the process, or have I missed something?
Theora is patented, but On2 already said it would be no problem, but Nokia is concerned about a non-obvious company waiting for a single big player to adapt those technologies to bring a suit.
That is a pretty hard to believe claim at this point. VP3 was sold by On2 for years, and is used by many companies. Later versions use many of the same methods, and have been very widely adopted by many large companies. AOL has licensed multiple VP* versions for Nullsoft TV, and AIM Video. Adobe has included VP6 in Flash. etc.
It's extremely hard to believe the patent trolls have such restraint that they haven't come out of the woodwork yet if they had a non-laughable claim.
The second is to use no technology newer than about two decades, ostensibly to avoid patent issues. I think Nokia is angling for this because it ultimately ends up being the same as specifying nothing, as any web content provider will be forced to not stick to the standard,
Not true:
MPEG-1 is a pretty good standard. At lower (video) bitrates, providing quality far better than MPEG-2, and competitive, if not quite as good as MPEG-4 ASP (Divx/Xvid/FMP4/etc). What's more, every video player out there can handle it. It should have been added to browsers years ago when the patents expired, if only to replace/obsolete MJPEG.
The VP3/Theora codec may have been created more recently, but it still provides lousy quality. Claims of it being competitive with h.264 are entirely delusional, from over-zealous supporters. Just check out the 2002 Doom9 Codec comparison: http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Docs/codecs.rar
And to make things worse, it takes a lot of number crunching just to get that lousy quality. The performance of VP3/Theora is terrible, requiring about a 500MHz system just to decode 320x240 video. My 2GHz system isn't quite able to handle even 720x480 VP3/Theora video. And finally, adding insult to injury, after some 5 years of development, the Theora encoder/decoder is actually WORSE quality than VP3.2. Why people that want patent-free video use alpha versions of Theora, rather than old and stable VP3.2, is a mystery to me.
MP2 audio still remains very competitive after all these years. I'd put it up against Dolby Digital/AC3/A52 any day. MP3 at lower bitrates admittedly can sound as good as MP2 at about 2/3rds the bitrate, but with audio being a small fraction of video size, the overall difference should be nominal.
Vorbis audio has problems of its own. While it might sound near perfect at low bitrates ~95% of the time, the other 5% of the time is brutally obvious, and gratingly bad. Every movie where I've tried encoding audio to Vorbis has at least one obvious, grating defect. Try encoding the audio of Das Boot to Vorbis, and you'll find several long passages where it sounds terrible.
The Ogg container is simply a complete mess, with high overhead. It is hated by all. No exceptions. Ask anyone who has written an Ogg demuxer. I'd have to say Matroska actually only exists because so many people didn't want to use Ogg.
it will never work because nobody would ever want their car half full, or less, right as they are about to head out on a long trip.
When you're planning on a car trip, you SHUT OFF this V2G mode, and put it on the normal charging cycle.
The other 99% of the time, when you need less than half the range to get you through the day, you leave it to charge in V2G mode, and potentially make some money while it's sitting there. It's not an issue.
The only issue is the lifetime of the batteries and converters, and the amount of money the power companies are going to pay participants for providing the service.
Though, peak metering would serve the same purpose better, and once there are a significant number of electric vehicles, the off-peak loads will be high enough to make it economical to just build more power plants, and run them at max capacity 24 hours a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It would be fine for an article to cite such an official, but to have them actually doing the writing is stomping all over the independence of the press. Government officials have a deep conflict of interest in reporting about subjects they are directly involved in.
I've always been fascinated by the the VOA. The vast majority of Americans are completely clueless that the US has government media, because the VOA is strictly restricted from intentionally broadcasting to US citizens. Even though the VOA is established as an independent agency, without direct government control, legislators were highly concerned that even that indirect control would be far too tempting, and the VOA would be turned into a voice of propaganda. The design has been highly effective, and despite being controlled by the US government, it has been a commonly trusted source of unbiased news (for the rest of the world) for about half a century now.
The moral of the story being, there's little justification for authorities having a say in media reports about their own actions. They have enough authority without being able to dictate the terms on which the public is informed.
First off, MPEG-1 is no longer patent restricted, and is newer and better than h.261.
Second, 10X is clearly a made-up number. Through the past 20+ years of lossy video compression, there hasn't been an order of magnitude improvement in compression at all. And even if there had been such an improvement, Theora certainly wouldn't be the codec in a position to do it, as it's pretty poor quality. If you're really seeing that huge of a difference, you're doing something HORRIBLY wrong.
I have tried h.261 even though support for it is pretty flaky, and I use MPEG-1 EXTENSIVELY today (on SVCDs and DVDs, in lieu of MPEG-2). I've got a video encoding to MPEG-1 right now... I would put libavcodec's MPEG-1 up against Theora any day. If nothing else, the quality is quite close, and MPEG-1 requires a tiny fraction of the CPU power to encoder or decode.
That's only according to some guy from Nokia, who clearly has a massive bias.
On2 had sold VP3 licenses for years, as well as for newer versions (VP4/5/6/7) based on many of the same methods as VP3. Those codecs have long been licensed, and widely used by very large companies like AOL (Nullsoft TV, AIM Video), Macromedia, Adobe (Flash v7), BBC (QuickLink field broadcasts), eBay (Skype Video), and no doubt many many more. The fact that no patent trolls have come out of the woodwork yet is pretty damn strong evidence that Theora is in the clear.
That's pretty much how all video codecs start out... Theora is still in beta, yet there is quite a bit of content from sites such as http://v2v.cc/
For the same reason we need image requirements for text markup. In fact HTML already has a specified video format: raw MJPEG, it just happens to suck.
I long wished MPEG-1 had been specified for web video (to supersede MJPEG) when it's patents had first expired, but it never happened, no doubt because some many companies have vested interests in getting those patent license fees.
Dolby Labs does the same thing whenever a video standard is being defined... they throw a good amount of money in bribes around, and make sure the standards (in all those countries that have software patents) include only Dolby, despite MP2/Musicam being as good, and trivially easy to include as an alternative. So while our European friends can put free MP2 audio on their DVDs, and in their DTV broadcasts, in the US we are absolutely required to have a Dolby Digital/AC3 audio track.
Now that is an extremely contentious claim to make, and yet you state your opinion as fact, and do so with an utter and complete lack of evidence of any kind to support it...
By all means, prove it.
That's right, Satan is a mathematician now...
I guess he got tired of all the paperwork associated with being a lawyer.
Yes, but faster computers hold the potential for reducing the astronomical development (and testing) costs. I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to built a cluster of PCs than it is to vaporize a Pacific island nation.
Well, that really doesn't apply to Iran, as you're practically not allowed to export anything to them. And as for other (friendly) countries, I imagine it's just to keep the US a few years ahead of the rest of the world in brute-forcing crypo, advanced cruise missiles, etc. not entirely preventing bomb and missile development.
Actually, they turned down an arrangement to get nuclear material from Russia, so that they could
The idea behind sanctions is to enact them before that can happen, ideal to prevent them the opportunity...
As for the reasons sanctions have been imposed... Do you make a habit out of asking others to answer questions you could very quickly find the answer to, on your own?
Do not look into laser harp with remaining eye.
This FCC rule only requires towers have 8 hour capacity anyhow, so you're only going to see at most 3X the run time over your current situation.
The article talks a lot about diesel generators--nothing about natural gas generators, solar cells, wind turbines, etc.--so you can pretty safely assume cell towers will have just enough fuel to run for 8 hours before shutting down, and remain that way until power is restored.
Clearly stating MPEG STARTED only after h.261 was finished.
By all means, prove it. Or at least try to. I'd really like to know where you got the idea that they are identical. I have not seen a single source that equates the two. In fact most specifically state that MPEG-1 was a later effort.
libavcodec has entirely separate encoders and decoders for MPEG-1 and h.261. A quick look through the code suggest they are significantly different, for example with h.261 containing a loop filter, but apparently not supporting trellis quantization.
In which case, he very likely wouldn't be posting on slashdot, wouldn't be spending precious time ripping all his CDs, and wouldn't be shopping around for a portable player.
MPEG-2 is horrible at low bitrates, and needs very, very high bitrates to get good quality... far higher than MPEG-4 ASP or h.264. I can't see anyone ever using it for web video. Though, with that said, MPEG-2 is fully backwards compatible, so even if MPEG-2 is the standard, everyone can transparently use MPEG-1 instead.
MPEG-1 however, does very well at low bitrates, and all patents have long expired. MPEG-1 also comes with patent-free MP2 audio, which is easily on-par with AC3.
That Nokia instead suggest the older, less capable, and lower quality h.261 seems highly suspect.
That entire scenario would have gone quite differently if charging stations started appearing all over. Major airports tend to have several spots for electric vehicles. If major Hospitals did as well, you'd have wasted just a few seconds, instead, swiping a credit card, and plugging your car in.
No doubt you're on the east coast of the US, or someplace similar. Out here in the west, it's not an issue... Two states away is a full day of non-stop highway driving, many times beyond the reach of current electric vehicles.
Large cities, or even any cities at all, are few and very far between, so if there's any out-of-state emergency, you really need a plane ticket anyhow. Even in-state, you're either very close (Los Angeles to San Diego) or very, very far away (Los Angeles to San Francisco) and requiring a non-electric vehicle, if not a quick airline hop.
Not at all...
You have a 3-position switch... Off - V2G Charge - Max Charge
I don't believe anyone in the world is so lazy that they can't manage one extra click of a 3-position switch.
I guess the public is too lazy to enter rooms that have dual light switches as well...
I have no experience with h.261. I did not mentioned it, but rather MPEG-1.
On the contrary. I've compared the two extensively, and MPEG-1 still does a damn good job at low bitrates, and can be quite competitive with MPEG-4 ASP codecs like Divx/Xvid/FMP4.
Pretty much all of Apple's products... iPods and AppleTV plays h.264 (as well as many other portable video players), Quicktime has encoded to h.264 for a long time now, and so all of the trailers available on apple.com are in h.264 format. Any site providing "Quicktime" compatible files are probably using h.264. It's certainly not a significant percentage of online videos, though.
It's used in gaming because they don't want to pay patent fees. That's it.
"Nearly lossless" is a contradiction in terms. And furthermore, it's terribly inaccurate. Vorbis isn't significantly better than any of the other modern codecs out there. AAC, for instance, is probably better. And if you really want an amazing audio codec, try Musepack, it blows Vorbis and everything else away, while taking far less CPU power to encode or decode than even MP3.
Flash video isn't h.264. They're working on that in beta relases, most likely for release to the public in Flash v10.
Flash video can either be in Sorenson's Spark (derivative of h.263), or On2's VP6. And so far, Youtube doesn't use the latter.
No. MPEG-4 ASP has NOTHING to do with h.263. It's a completely different codec.
h.264/MPEG-4 Part10 AVC, is a rare coincidence, where the ITU's and MPEG's efforts happened to coincide, so they both worked together, and standardized on the same codec.
VC-1 is open, but NOT royalty free, completely unlike On2's VP3/Theora.
WMV9/VC-1 is probably the most wildly successful proprietary video codec ever. It is the most popular format for online videos, and has been for years. Flash is merely biting at it's heels now, and a long way from surpassing VC-1.
On the contrary, that's almost EXACTLY what it is. Microsoft is submitting their XML format for standarization, as they did with VC-1, but it's not going to be free of patent licensing fees, while OpenDocument format is.
No, it will make it nearly impossible, as FOSS projects can't pay the licensing fees associated with h.264/AAC/MP4. That's the reason why support is behind the 100% free Theora format instead.
It seems very strange that they would suggest h.261, and not MPEG-1, which is newer, but also more than old enough to be completely patent-free.
I don't know much about h.261 (I don't think I've EVER heard anyone mention it until reading this paper), but the first thing I've found out is that it's extremely restricted... You really are only allowed to have a resolution of 320x288. That's extremely crippling for us NTSC folks, and also for anyone who wants higher quality/resolution video than youtube, or just odd dimentions (due to cropping), widescreen, etc. It also doesn't seem to support numerous quality improving options that MPEG-1 does, such as trellis, macroblocks types, higher precision motion vectors, etc.
So again, I have to wonder aloud why they're recommending h.261 instead of MPEG-1. Are they really being that flagrant in trying to sabotage the process, or have I missed something?
That is a pretty hard to believe claim at this point. VP3 was sold by On2 for years, and is used by many companies. Later versions use many of the same methods, and have been very widely adopted by many large companies. AOL has licensed multiple VP* versions for Nullsoft TV, and AIM Video. Adobe has included VP6 in Flash. etc.
It's extremely hard to believe the patent trolls have such restraint that they haven't come out of the woodwork yet if they had a non-laughable claim.
Not true:
MPEG-1 is a pretty good standard. At lower (video) bitrates, providing quality far better than MPEG-2, and competitive, if not quite as good as MPEG-4 ASP (Divx/Xvid/FMP4/etc). What's more, every video player out there can handle it. It should have been added to browsers years ago when the patents expired, if only to replace/obsolete MJPEG.
The VP3/Theora codec may have been created more recently, but it still provides lousy quality. Claims of it being competitive with h.264 are entirely delusional, from over-zealous supporters. Just check out the 2002 Doom9 Codec comparison: http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Docs/codecs.rar
And to make things worse, it takes a lot of number crunching just to get that lousy quality. The performance of VP3/Theora is terrible, requiring about a 500MHz system just to decode 320x240 video. My 2GHz system isn't quite able to handle even 720x480 VP3/Theora video. And finally, adding insult to injury, after some 5 years of development, the Theora encoder/decoder is actually WORSE quality than VP3.2. Why people that want patent-free video use alpha versions of Theora, rather than old and stable VP3.2, is a mystery to me.
MP2 audio still remains very competitive after all these years. I'd put it up against Dolby Digital/AC3/A52 any day. MP3 at lower bitrates admittedly can sound as good as MP2 at about 2/3rds the bitrate, but with audio being a small fraction of video size, the overall difference should be nominal.
Vorbis audio has problems of its own. While it might sound near perfect at low bitrates ~95% of the time, the other 5% of the time is brutally obvious, and gratingly bad. Every movie where I've tried encoding audio to Vorbis has at least one obvious, grating defect. Try encoding the audio of Das Boot to Vorbis, and you'll find several long passages where it sounds terrible.
The Ogg container is simply a complete mess, with high overhead. It is hated by all. No exceptions. Ask anyone who has written an Ogg demuxer. I'd have to say Matroska actually only exists because so many people didn't want to use Ogg.
When you're planning on a car trip, you SHUT OFF this V2G mode, and put it on the normal charging cycle.
The other 99% of the time, when you need less than half the range to get you through the day, you leave it to charge in V2G mode, and potentially make some money while it's sitting there. It's not an issue.
The only issue is the lifetime of the batteries and converters, and the amount of money the power companies are going to pay participants for providing the service.
Though, peak metering would serve the same purpose better, and once there are a significant number of electric vehicles, the off-peak loads will be high enough to make it economical to just build more power plants, and run them at max capacity 24 hours a day.
You know, if the saying is good enough for taking away the public's privacy and civil liberties, it's surely good enough to apply to corporations:
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide.
If companies would just STOP COMMITTING CRIMES, it wouldn't matter that all their e-mails are on disk.
Are we supposed to feel bad that e-mail is allowing companies to be caught red handed, and forcing them to answer for their crimes?