Cars wouldn't be much of a problem. Within hours of all cars breaking down there would be small businesses offering to transport goods from stores to your door with makeshift bicycle drawn carriages. The distances are also small enough that a lot of people could go get supplies on foot.

Highway trucks and freight trains on the other hand. Yeah, that would be bad. If someone hacked all highway trucks and freight train locomotives, starvation would set in within a couple of days, since there is no other way to effectively transport resources over long distances and stores only last a day or two at most. Ships rely on trains and trucks for the last 100-500 miles to the consumer.

Modern civilization is still very much in beta.

The most extreme scenario that I have heard serious analysts mention would be a Polish rush into Ukraine to secure the crossings of the Dnieper River. There's your proxy war: Poland v.s. the the Russian-aligned "freedom fighters" of Eastern Ukraine.

Yes, that would probably be the case, but the host universe would still be greater than the guest universe in some sense. The host universe would, over time, have a greater number of interactions between things than the simulation would have.

Well, these sort of arguments depends on the assumption that we exist as so-called observer-moments and that your current experience is a randomly selected observer-moment out of all the observer-moments in all of time and space in all of the universes in the cosmos. This may be total BS, but several real philosophers seem to take it seriously.

When people say "maybe we're living in a simulation" they mean a simulation created by sentient beings. If we live in a simulation then the host universe has sentient beings in it by definition. So that's a given.

If it is a simulation you could argue that it is almost certainly optimized for sentient beings.

Based on what we know about simulators, they are inherently slower and smaller in scope than the system they run on. You're never going to have a virtual machine that is more powerful than the metal that it runs on. Similarly, you're probably not going to have a simulated universe be more powerful than the universe that is hosting the simulated universe.

Think about it this way: if you're going to build models of 2x4 Lego bricks using 2x4 Lego bricks, the models will be much fewer in number than the actual Lego bricks. If you find yourself being a Lego brick, odds are you are an actual Lego brick and not a model Lego brick.

Also, tightly packed systems where the components of the systems are small and close to one another in space are faster than systems where the components are large and far from one another in space, because communication happens at the speed of light, which is constant (as far as we know).

On the other hand, if we build a model that focuses on modelling one particular thing and neglects a bunch of other stuff then the probabilities change. Perhaps we live in a simulator hosted by a much larger universe where there is virtually no life except for the being that built the simulator, whereas our simulation is optimized to be relatively packed with life.

Apple removed the ability for iOS apps to read the iPhone's / iPad's / iPod's device id with iOS 7, which means any software that relied on that would no longer work.

Or in other words: make a product with actual lasting value. Oh, the horror!

Another way to look at it is that the close encounter between a comet and Mars is perhaps a once in a century opportunity to learn about how material from the comet interacts with Mars and its atmosphere, so the satellites in orbit around Mars should mainly be looking down at the effects on Mars.

Spacecraft-comet encounters can be had a lot more frequently than spacecraft-planet-comet encounters.

Manned capsules must have an emergency escape system.

Basically what would happen is explosive bolts would detach the capsule from the rocket and the capsule would fly away under its own power until it's far enough away from the rocket. Then the rocket would self destruct and the capsule would come down to a safe-ish landing either under parachutes or under its own power.

This is nothing new, NASA had this in the 1960's, the Russians evidently had it in the 1980's. Also the Kerbals, apparently.

Swap is not optional if you're going to use leaky software (like for instance browse the web) on a linux machine for long periods of time without rebooting. Firefox or Chrome can easily grow to 4 or 8 gigs over time if you don't have a swap partition. If you have 16+ gigs of RAM on your machine you might not need swap at this time, but as web sites become ever more bloated you will need to upgrade to more RAM or get a swap partition or swap file.

That should read smaller than 2GB. 4 gigs is usually a good size.

Do you have a swap partition and is it reasonably large? A lot of strange stuff can happen if you decide you don't need a swap partition (think again), or if you use a really small swap partition, i.e. 2GB.

If that's the case, then why is it that every single time I find out about some interesting software I have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get a reasonably up to date version of that software?

This is on the latest version of Ubuntu.

Permissions on Android are a bit more rudimentary, so it would be simple to make a background process that just sits and quietly listens to the gyro. You would need to ask for the permission to keep the device awake in order to keep the CPU and sensor chip alive and (in order for it to be practical) the permission to start on boot.