My school administrators bought cheaper ink than yours.:-) Either that, or we reused the ribbons long past their service life. I still have a punched card (from my father) where the ink across the top has faded completely, and the only remaining information is in the holes.
That was just an example for Slashdot using completely made up temperature numbers. If the boot of an Aussiewagon can climb to 70C, then select the fasteners to pop at 80C. Or instead of temperature, have them pop with non-toxic common solvents, like fresh water to release the circuit boards, salt water to release stainless steel, and vinegar to release the ABS plastics. Or maybe have the rivets contain an antifreeze that would expand and burst the connectors if it's frozen below -40C. You could have a ring with a pull-tab that would yank out the disassembling connectors in the proper order. You could even bind the product with nichrome wire, and have a series of electrical connection points that would melt fusible key fasteners in the proper order. There are dozens of ways this could be done electrically, mechanically, or using temperatures or chemicals. Using varying melting temperatures of thermoplastics would be nice because they would keep the process simple (plastic rivets are really cheap, and it would require almost no technology to slowly roast a product over heat to reclaim the materials), but other methods might work as well.
The product could also simply be labeled: "Store the device where the temperature is between -20 and 45 C (-4 to 113 F). Don’t leave the device in your car, because temperatures in parked cars can exceed this range." That seems to work well enough for Apple, as that's exactly the line from their support page on the subject: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2101 In other words, if you cooked it it's your problem.
30 years ago you probably would have stored your long-term data on a 5-1/4" floppy. You also might have punched it to paper tape, or written it to a 9-track magnetic tape. You could even have recorded it on a cassette deck. Which of those technologies does your daily machine still read today?
So, in 2043, which interfacing technologies will your daily machine still have that are compatible with today's standards? USB? CF or SD cards? SATA? What about Lightning, or Firewire? HDMI? DVD or BluRay?
In thirty years I hope things are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable by today's standards. If not, we haven't made things as good as they could be.
Besides, he doesn't have a lot of text. Volume isn't his problem, permanence is.
Bar codes may be a risky choice. Do you know if barcodes will even be in use in 2043? Will you still be able to buy a barcode scanner, or will everything be marked differently? RFID might get cheap enough to take over, or OCR readers might render barcodes obsolete. The formats you are thinking of are also not very dense, meaning you can't stuff a lot of information into them. 2D barcodes such as PDF-417 are much more dense, but lose that visible correspondence to text.
Remember, 30 years is half of forever in the computing world. Think about the changes that have happened since 1983: do you still have a 5-1/4" floppy disk reader? Do you still have a proprietary keyboard connector? What about an ST-506 compatible hard disk drive, and an 8-bit ISA bus drive controller card? Do you still have any 8 bit ISA buses to plug the card into? Any Hollerith punched card readers, or punched paper tape readers? Do you even have any greenbar printouts from 1983 still hanging around?
Some interfaces are longer lived than others. RS-232 has been around since at least the 1960s. UPC barcodes have been around since the 1970s, but are being slowly replaced by GS1 DataBar barcodes. Code 3 of 9 came around in the early 1980s and has remained viable. But people are slowly recognizing the troubles with barcodes: they're not human readable (therefore they're forgeable by criminals and unverifiable and untrustworthy to ordinary humans), they require a clean and undamaged image area, and many readers still require alignment of the barcode and scanner to read. Most businesses really want to get rid of barcodes and move to something like RFID tags (which have many advantages,) but because barcodes are still cheap as dirt, they haven't yet been replaced.
Honestly, I think this guy should look to printing his data in an OCR-friendly font and skip the barcode idea altogether.
That's actually the basis for her entire argument, minus the goddess-worshipping bits. If nature can produce cellulose without a furnace, why can't we produce it without a furnace?
The obvious answer is that we don't have the patience required to grow a 3D chair instead of printing one. But she raises an interesting challenge.
What I meant was to use different materials engineered to self-destruct as the rivets or fasteners. Then you could follow a formula to recycle it: Heat it to 50C and the case separates. Heat it to 60C, and all the 60C screws holding the circuit boards melt, allowing recovery of electronics and precious metals. Heat to 75C and all the ABS parts pop off. Continue heating to 90C and all the aluminum rails come apart. Apply steam, and all the steel separates.
You could even spring load the fasteners so that when it's melting time, the correct materials literally fly out of the assembly.
Then you simply drop an unwanted clock-radio in the waste stream, scan its recycling code, and all the recyclables are automatically separated and recovered.
We could fix a lot of this by engineering stuff to be recyclable. Imagine assembly with connectors designed to come apart in easy to create environments. Maybe the rivets release all ABS parts at 75C, and all aluminum parts at 90C.
Maybe that's why tort reform isn't happening. Everyone but the 1% gets screwed, but if it's blatantly unfair, the occasional prole can sue for a million dollars and win. It's like the promise of the lottery: "oh, look,there's hope for the little guy who sued McCorp and won." That's an affordable expense to keep discontent low.
Sadly, many of my old dot matrix and teletype printouts have faded as much as any other liquid ink I've used. It depends entirely on the ink in the ribbon. The liquid ink present in ordinary ribbons was often of wildly varying quality, and most people who bought those ribbons in bulk sought out the cheapest possible ribbons. I wouldn't bet on their longevity.
Laser printed pages consist of carbon in plastic, and there's no reason they shouldn't last a century or more, as long as certain conditions are met: if the toner is properly fused to the paper, if the paper doesn't degrade beneath it, and if the facing page doesn't adhere to the toner.
1. Your printer should have the right temperature set in the fuser, and that's probably not even adjustable to you. If the toner comes out dusty or smeary, it's too cool. If it comes out brown and crispy, it's too hot:-) You should recognize it immediately if the print quality is poor.
2. Store the paper properly. Heat is your enemy: don't let it get too hot, and don't store anything you want preserved in sunlight. Don't let it get damp - mold will destroy paper. Don't use crappy paper that will disintegrate - acid free is always the recommendation for long term storage. Horizontal stacks of paper will apply a lot of pressure to the sheets near the bottom of the stack, vertical hanging files reduce this pressure.
3. Watch out for printed sheets facing other printed sheets, (like double sided printing) where the toner from bottom side of the upper sheet can stick to the toner on the top side of the lower sheet. A horizontal stack of paper, especially in a hot environment, will apply a lot of pressure that cause the toners to fuse together where they touch. I've also had problems with toner adhering to vinyl sheets commonly found in 3 ring binders or binder covers.
The problem comes with professional violators of Poe's Law, such as Stephen Colbert's character, "Steven Colbert of the Colbert Report". He's a parody of every right wing nut job talk show host. His schtick is to take a right-wing agenda item and push it beyond its obvious short term benefits to its logical but socially detrimental conclusion, where he continues to defend it even more vigorously using Republican platform talking points, ad hominem attacks, and every other logical fallacy he can throw at it. He does this consistently without ever breaking character. And he has a flock of brilliant writers who are able to help him pull this off night after night.
As a matter of fact, he is so consistent that he was mistaken for an actual right wing comedian, and was invited to speak at the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2006 where he lampooned George W. Bush to his face for fifteen straight minutes. Very few of the faithful present laughed at the routine. President Bush turned red almost from the get-go, politely grimaced out a smile, sat through the entire speech, and left the stage immediately after Colbert finished. I have no doubt that heads rolled within five minutes. ( My favorite joke from the event went something like, " 'Those naysayers claim that this administration is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' That is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring! If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!" )
If you're not starting with a good constitution, preserving it isn't going to help. Egypt's most recent constitution was drafted entirely by Islamists after the secularists and Christians walked out when it was clear it was going to embody Sharia law and other Islamist practices at the expense of human rights.
Energy is energy. The difference between an explosive detonation and compressed air being released from a ruptured container is the amount of time it takes for it to escape. An atomic warhead lets it all out within milliseconds (the historic Trinity test showed a 300 meter fireball at 25 milliseconds, and that was estimated to be 84 terajoules.) A ruptured pressurized tank would let the energy out much more slowly than a detonation, but still very fast. And we're talking about petajoules of energy.
Let's say there was a crack that led to the surface, and the air started escaping. It would quickly erode the walls of the crack, opening a progressively larger hole. At some point the surrounding earth would be weakened and give way, releasing the bulk of the air in a very short amount of time. I'm guessing that once the hole is big enough, it would likely take less than a second for the bulk of the air to escape.
It might not be nearly as powerful as the shockwave generated by a hydrogen bomb, but it might be close to the destructive power of an atomic bomb.
207 megawatt-hours times 24 hours/day times 40 days represents the storage of over 7 petajoules of energy. By comparison, a one megaton hydrogen bomb releases about 4 petajoules. That means this chamber will be continuously containing the equivalent energy of a city-leveling nuclear blast. It better be really big, because it's going to be really stressed. It's not like salt is nature's pre-made engineered compressed gas cylinder.
And what happens if the salt chamber ruptures and the air finds its way to the surface? This would go off like a compressed air volcano. I would be afraid to live or work within 10 miles of this thing.
Ah, I think I understand what you're getting at. The core concept I think you're missing is that there is no "car computer". There isn't a single central computer running everything, with just wires to remote sensors and actuators. Instead, the car is built from of dozens of distributed systems, all interconnected via the CAN bus. The engine has its own computer, and its tasks include firing spark plugs, monitoring engine sensors, etc. The ABS has its own computer, and all it does is to monitor and modulate the brakes. The dashboard is its own computer, and simply displays data coming from the various other systems. And the infotainment system is its own computer, and is hideously complex, and does no end of crap. I believe my car has over 140 individual systems on the bus.
Each device on the bus has an independent processor that does whatever the device is supposed to do, a CAN controller, and a transceiver that isolates the device from the bus (thus preventing a wonky stereo from shutting down the engine.) Some devices transmit data constantly, such as the engine controller continuously sending RPM and exhaust gas temperature. Some devices only transmit data when they do something "interesting", like the seat belt detectors or the tire pressure sensors. Others don't normally transmit much data, but instead read from other sources of data and do something with it. The remote control mirrors are an example of a device that doesn't send much of anything, but constantly listens for other information.
Each system works independently, talking to and from the bus as required. The bus protocol arbitrates amongst itself to figure out who is sending the highest priority message, so things like airbag deployment can take precedence over changing the radio station. The CAN bus is that standard interface you were asking about.
The "infotainment" system has expanded beyond sound and is becoming the center of control for things like climate and navigation. When you tap the "A/C" icon on the screen to turn on the air conditioning, it'll send an "calling for cabin A/C" message over the bus. But it's not in charge of your car. Your car will continue to work even if someone pries it out of the dashboard, (as long as they didn't steal the security system, too.) You maybe won't be able to adjust the climate, you won't have a satnav system, but your car will still work. And you could replace that panel with a different panel. The horrible "MyTouch" control panel is an option in Ford cars (unfortunately standard on their higher end packages), but you can get simpler option packages that don't include it, and instead have a panel with actual tactile controls. Both panels use the same CAN bus and interface to talk to the rest of the car's systems.
However, my phone is not part of the car system, why should my GPS and music player be part of that system?
In my car, the stereo system connects to the phone via Bluetooth. There is no other independent wireless communication system available to the car. At startup, after connecting to my phone, the display announces "911 Assist enabled". My stereo needs to know when the airbags have been deployed so it can call 911 on my behalf. Thus they need to be connected.
In your car, there may be a more subtle reason. Perhaps a phone interface is an option it didn't come with, but it is pre-wired to support it. Maybe the gas gauge is tied to the nav system to highlight gas stations when you have less than 1/8 tank of fuel remaining. Maybe the nav system feeds the vehicle data recorder. Maybe your car has warning sounds that play through the audio system. Or maybe the volume control is tied to the speedometer to keep the music level appropriate for the road noise.
I don't know what your particular car does or is capable of. But there could be a dozen obscure reasons the car could want to talk to the satnav or audio systems.
Yep. A touch screen has no place in a car. They can be installed very nicely, even by an amateur, but they will always be a stupid idea because drivers are humans that have two eyeballs, both facing forward.
Slashdot Mirror
My school administrators bought cheaper ink than yours. :-) Either that, or we reused the ribbons long past their service life. I still have a punched card (from my father) where the ink across the top has faded completely, and the only remaining information is in the holes.
That was just an example for Slashdot using completely made up temperature numbers. If the boot of an Aussiewagon can climb to 70C, then select the fasteners to pop at 80C. Or instead of temperature, have them pop with non-toxic common solvents, like fresh water to release the circuit boards, salt water to release stainless steel, and vinegar to release the ABS plastics. Or maybe have the rivets contain an antifreeze that would expand and burst the connectors if it's frozen below -40C. You could have a ring with a pull-tab that would yank out the disassembling connectors in the proper order. You could even bind the product with nichrome wire, and have a series of electrical connection points that would melt fusible key fasteners in the proper order. There are dozens of ways this could be done electrically, mechanically, or using temperatures or chemicals. Using varying melting temperatures of thermoplastics would be nice because they would keep the process simple (plastic rivets are really cheap, and it would require almost no technology to slowly roast a product over heat to reclaim the materials), but other methods might work as well.
The product could also simply be labeled: "Store the device where the temperature is between -20 and 45 C (-4 to 113 F). Don’t leave the device in your car, because temperatures in parked cars can exceed this range." That seems to work well enough for Apple, as that's exactly the line from their support page on the subject: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2101 In other words, if you cooked it it's your problem.
30 years ago you probably would have stored your long-term data on a 5-1/4" floppy. You also might have punched it to paper tape, or written it to a 9-track magnetic tape. You could even have recorded it on a cassette deck. Which of those technologies does your daily machine still read today?
So, in 2043, which interfacing technologies will your daily machine still have that are compatible with today's standards? USB? CF or SD cards? SATA? What about Lightning, or Firewire? HDMI? DVD or BluRay?
In thirty years I hope things are so advanced as to be almost unrecognizable by today's standards. If not, we haven't made things as good as they could be.
Besides, he doesn't have a lot of text. Volume isn't his problem, permanence is.
Bar codes may be a risky choice. Do you know if barcodes will even be in use in 2043? Will you still be able to buy a barcode scanner, or will everything be marked differently? RFID might get cheap enough to take over, or OCR readers might render barcodes obsolete. The formats you are thinking of are also not very dense, meaning you can't stuff a lot of information into them. 2D barcodes such as PDF-417 are much more dense, but lose that visible correspondence to text.
Remember, 30 years is half of forever in the computing world. Think about the changes that have happened since 1983: do you still have a 5-1/4" floppy disk reader? Do you still have a proprietary keyboard connector? What about an ST-506 compatible hard disk drive, and an 8-bit ISA bus drive controller card? Do you still have any 8 bit ISA buses to plug the card into? Any Hollerith punched card readers, or punched paper tape readers? Do you even have any greenbar printouts from 1983 still hanging around?
Some interfaces are longer lived than others. RS-232 has been around since at least the 1960s. UPC barcodes have been around since the 1970s, but are being slowly replaced by GS1 DataBar barcodes. Code 3 of 9 came around in the early 1980s and has remained viable. But people are slowly recognizing the troubles with barcodes: they're not human readable (therefore they're forgeable by criminals and unverifiable and untrustworthy to ordinary humans), they require a clean and undamaged image area, and many readers still require alignment of the barcode and scanner to read. Most businesses really want to get rid of barcodes and move to something like RFID tags (which have many advantages,) but because barcodes are still cheap as dirt, they haven't yet been replaced.
Honestly, I think this guy should look to printing his data in an OCR-friendly font and skip the barcode idea altogether.
Nature (the environment) uses what is available.
That's actually the basis for her entire argument, minus the goddess-worshipping bits. If nature can produce cellulose without a furnace, why can't we produce it without a furnace?
The obvious answer is that we don't have the patience required to grow a 3D chair instead of printing one. But she raises an interesting challenge.
Is there anything that hasn't 'been shown to cause cancer in animals'?
Yes. They've found that death stops cancer from attacking any animal. Side effects include an elevated risk of mortality, including death.
What I meant was to use different materials engineered to self-destruct as the rivets or fasteners. Then you could follow a formula to recycle it: Heat it to 50C and the case separates. Heat it to 60C, and all the 60C screws holding the circuit boards melt, allowing recovery of electronics and precious metals. Heat to 75C and all the ABS parts pop off. Continue heating to 90C and all the aluminum rails come apart. Apply steam, and all the steel separates.
You could even spring load the fasteners so that when it's melting time, the correct materials literally fly out of the assembly.
Then you simply drop an unwanted clock-radio in the waste stream, scan its recycling code, and all the recyclables are automatically separated and recovered.
We could fix a lot of this by engineering stuff to be recyclable. Imagine assembly with connectors designed to come apart in easy to create environments. Maybe the rivets release all ABS parts at 75C, and all aluminum parts at 90C.
Maybe that's why tort reform isn't happening. Everyone but the 1% gets screwed, but if it's blatantly unfair, the occasional prole can sue for a million dollars and win. It's like the promise of the lottery: "oh, look,there's hope for the little guy who sued McCorp and won." That's an affordable expense to keep discontent low.
Sadly, many of my old dot matrix and teletype printouts have faded as much as any other liquid ink I've used. It depends entirely on the ink in the ribbon. The liquid ink present in ordinary ribbons was often of wildly varying quality, and most people who bought those ribbons in bulk sought out the cheapest possible ribbons. I wouldn't bet on their longevity.
Laser printed pages consist of carbon in plastic, and there's no reason they shouldn't last a century or more, as long as certain conditions are met: if the toner is properly fused to the paper, if the paper doesn't degrade beneath it, and if the facing page doesn't adhere to the toner.
1. Your printer should have the right temperature set in the fuser, and that's probably not even adjustable to you. If the toner comes out dusty or smeary, it's too cool. If it comes out brown and crispy, it's too hot :-) You should recognize it immediately if the print quality is poor.
2. Store the paper properly. Heat is your enemy: don't let it get too hot, and don't store anything you want preserved in sunlight. Don't let it get damp - mold will destroy paper. Don't use crappy paper that will disintegrate - acid free is always the recommendation for long term storage. Horizontal stacks of paper will apply a lot of pressure to the sheets near the bottom of the stack, vertical hanging files reduce this pressure.
3. Watch out for printed sheets facing other printed sheets, (like double sided printing) where the toner from bottom side of the upper sheet can stick to the toner on the top side of the lower sheet. A horizontal stack of paper, especially in a hot environment, will apply a lot of pressure that cause the toners to fuse together where they touch. I've also had problems with toner adhering to vinyl sheets commonly found in 3 ring binders or binder covers.
Though I wish they had said what crazy swedish name they were going to call these things.
I figured they'd call it SHAANTEA.
The problem comes with professional violators of Poe's Law, such as Stephen Colbert's character, "Steven Colbert of the Colbert Report". He's a parody of every right wing nut job talk show host. His schtick is to take a right-wing agenda item and push it beyond its obvious short term benefits to its logical but socially detrimental conclusion, where he continues to defend it even more vigorously using Republican platform talking points, ad hominem attacks, and every other logical fallacy he can throw at it. He does this consistently without ever breaking character. And he has a flock of brilliant writers who are able to help him pull this off night after night.
As a matter of fact, he is so consistent that he was mistaken for an actual right wing comedian, and was invited to speak at the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2006 where he lampooned George W. Bush to his face for fifteen straight minutes. Very few of the faithful present laughed at the routine. President Bush turned red almost from the get-go, politely grimaced out a smile, sat through the entire speech, and left the stage immediately after Colbert finished. I have no doubt that heads rolled within five minutes. ( My favorite joke from the event went something like, " 'Those naysayers claim that this administration is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' That is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring! If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!" )
...stop wanting stupid shit
Technically speaking, there was little incremental gain at great expense and modest inconvenience.
But I like your description better.
. . . you know, like A.D., as in, "Anno Disneyi" . . . ?
. . . and BCE . . . "Before Crap Era" . . .
BCE == Before Copyrights were Eternal.
No, it did not. You are misremembering it because it was changed and has been seen in that form so many times since.
The Episode IV moniker was added to the film later.
He's obviously confused or deranged. Next he'll be claiming something outlandish, like "Han shot first" or something equally absurd.
If you're not starting with a good constitution, preserving it isn't going to help. Egypt's most recent constitution was drafted entirely by Islamists after the secularists and Christians walked out when it was clear it was going to embody Sharia law and other Islamist practices at the expense of human rights.
I think the whole conquering / slavery thing was kind of a negative. You're probably not going to get a lot of support for that approach.
Poor, poor Morsi, what'cha gonna do? al-Sisi's haunting you, hey, what'cha gonna do?
I think the story is low cost/inexpensive.
Low cost? Have you seen the prices for atomic refill cartridges for this thing? And you thought ink jet ink was overpriced!
Energy is energy. The difference between an explosive detonation and compressed air being released from a ruptured container is the amount of time it takes for it to escape. An atomic warhead lets it all out within milliseconds (the historic Trinity test showed a 300 meter fireball at 25 milliseconds, and that was estimated to be 84 terajoules.) A ruptured pressurized tank would let the energy out much more slowly than a detonation, but still very fast. And we're talking about petajoules of energy.
Let's say there was a crack that led to the surface, and the air started escaping. It would quickly erode the walls of the crack, opening a progressively larger hole. At some point the surrounding earth would be weakened and give way, releasing the bulk of the air in a very short amount of time. I'm guessing that once the hole is big enough, it would likely take less than a second for the bulk of the air to escape.
It might not be nearly as powerful as the shockwave generated by a hydrogen bomb, but it might be close to the destructive power of an atomic bomb.
207 megawatt-hours times 24 hours/day times 40 days represents the storage of over 7 petajoules of energy. By comparison, a one megaton hydrogen bomb releases about 4 petajoules. That means this chamber will be continuously containing the equivalent energy of a city-leveling nuclear blast. It better be really big, because it's going to be really stressed. It's not like salt is nature's pre-made engineered compressed gas cylinder.
And what happens if the salt chamber ruptures and the air finds its way to the surface? This would go off like a compressed air volcano. I would be afraid to live or work within 10 miles of this thing.
Ah, I think I understand what you're getting at. The core concept I think you're missing is that there is no "car computer". There isn't a single central computer running everything, with just wires to remote sensors and actuators. Instead, the car is built from of dozens of distributed systems, all interconnected via the CAN bus. The engine has its own computer, and its tasks include firing spark plugs, monitoring engine sensors, etc. The ABS has its own computer, and all it does is to monitor and modulate the brakes. The dashboard is its own computer, and simply displays data coming from the various other systems. And the infotainment system is its own computer, and is hideously complex, and does no end of crap. I believe my car has over 140 individual systems on the bus.
Each device on the bus has an independent processor that does whatever the device is supposed to do, a CAN controller, and a transceiver that isolates the device from the bus (thus preventing a wonky stereo from shutting down the engine.) Some devices transmit data constantly, such as the engine controller continuously sending RPM and exhaust gas temperature. Some devices only transmit data when they do something "interesting", like the seat belt detectors or the tire pressure sensors. Others don't normally transmit much data, but instead read from other sources of data and do something with it. The remote control mirrors are an example of a device that doesn't send much of anything, but constantly listens for other information.
Each system works independently, talking to and from the bus as required. The bus protocol arbitrates amongst itself to figure out who is sending the highest priority message, so things like airbag deployment can take precedence over changing the radio station. The CAN bus is that standard interface you were asking about.
The "infotainment" system has expanded beyond sound and is becoming the center of control for things like climate and navigation. When you tap the "A/C" icon on the screen to turn on the air conditioning, it'll send an "calling for cabin A/C" message over the bus. But it's not in charge of your car. Your car will continue to work even if someone pries it out of the dashboard, (as long as they didn't steal the security system, too.) You maybe won't be able to adjust the climate, you won't have a satnav system, but your car will still work. And you could replace that panel with a different panel. The horrible "MyTouch" control panel is an option in Ford cars (unfortunately standard on their higher end packages), but you can get simpler option packages that don't include it, and instead have a panel with actual tactile controls. Both panels use the same CAN bus and interface to talk to the rest of the car's systems.
However, my phone is not part of the car system, why should my GPS and music player be part of that system?
In my car, the stereo system connects to the phone via Bluetooth. There is no other independent wireless communication system available to the car. At startup, after connecting to my phone, the display announces "911 Assist enabled". My stereo needs to know when the airbags have been deployed so it can call 911 on my behalf. Thus they need to be connected.
In your car, there may be a more subtle reason. Perhaps a phone interface is an option it didn't come with, but it is pre-wired to support it. Maybe the gas gauge is tied to the nav system to highlight gas stations when you have less than 1/8 tank of fuel remaining. Maybe the nav system feeds the vehicle data recorder. Maybe your car has warning sounds that play through the audio system. Or maybe the volume control is tied to the speedometer to keep the music level appropriate for the road noise.
I don't know what your particular car does or is capable of. But there could be a dozen obscure reasons the car could want to talk to the satnav or audio systems.
Can I play Angry Birds on my touch screen? It would idle away a long journey. Maybe I could just tape my tablet to the steering wheel.
Tape? Why not buy a mounting kit? http://www.ipadandiphonestuff.com/colby-ipad-steering-wheel-mount-p-188.html
Yep. A touch screen has no place in a car. They can be installed very nicely, even by an amateur, but they will always be a stupid idea because drivers are humans that have two eyeballs, both facing forward.