As fictional creations they are as fast or slow as the writer needs them to be in order to advance the plot. Original zombies were shambling and slow. They caught people through numbers and surprise. Or by pursuing the person until they made a wrong turn and got cornered. Shaun of the Dead plays on this older zombie concept.

Using your example of The Last of Us, there are several situations in which the main characters would absolutely have been killed were they not wearing full plot armor. But the zombie moved just a hair too slow, or got distracted, or went too fast and somehow overshoots. Or tackles them in just the perfect way to not be able to manage a bite. Never happens for the poor schmucks in the background though. Zombies run 'em down, pure focus, perfect aim. Tackle them mouth first, bitten in less than a second. Turned in 5 seconds. No hours long mournful transition allowing tearful goodbyes with loved ones.

Its the quickest way to check a 9v to see if its good

Imagine you have a dice with 1 million sides. Your chance of rolling 123,456 is 1 in 1 million, or 0.0001%. You start rolling the dice once a day. Each day the chance the dice will land on 123,456 is 1 in 1 million. That doesn't change day to day. Now lets fast forward in time 10 million days. You've rolled the dice 10 million times. Each individual roll was still a super tiny chance. But the odds that you won't have landed on 123,456 in those 10 million roles is approximately 0.0045%. (0.999999^10,000,000)

There is still a chance that you won't have rolled a 123,456 but it is very small.

Insider trading isn't illegal. Certain types of insider trading are. The main difference: illegal insider trading involves information not available to the public. A CEO can sell or buy stock as they please so long as they aren't tying it to info unavailable to the public.

Employees with over 10% ownership are considered insiders. They have to report stock sales of that company to the SEC within 2 days of a transaction. There is also a 6 month blackout after transactions. If they buy shares, they can't sell them for 6 months.

The Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 put C-level execs under a lot of scrutiny and it still remains. The government has a strong interest in preventing another Enron from happening.

As with any law and/or regulation everything comes down to enforcement. And I'm sure there are plenty of execs that are willing to roll the dice on sliding a transaction by using privildged info.

The card contains a tiny antenna and chip. The scanner emits a field that both communicates with the chip in your card as well as provides it power, similar to how a wireless phone charger works.

The chip contains a code that is linked to you in the school's student database. The scanner will check with the database to make sure you are allowed in that location. It may also log what time you scanned your badge and where.

The internet is just a series of comnected networks. Your local ISP is just providing a connection from your home to a higher level regional network. If you had the time and money you could contact the higher level network company and negotiate a connection to them yourself without needing an ISP company.

So thats what this guy did. He negotiated a connection to a regional provider and installed the equipment and lines for the connection. Most people don't do it because it takes a lot of money and regulatory approvals for the lines. Its normally less expensive for each person to pay an ISP because then the costs are shared among all the customers.

A wireless jammer cannot block a wired connection. So if everything was connected with cables the internet would work. Unless they cut that cable somewhere.

Jammers work by transmitting a strong noise signal on the frequency being jammed. The wider the frequency range the more power the jammer needs to overwhelm the signals. Jammers don't actually block the signal, they just overwhelm it. Kind of like if you are talking with a friend standing next to you. In a quiet room you can hear each other just fine. The jammer acts like a loud rock concert. You are still talking, but the other person can't hear you because the surrounding noise is too loud.

What kind of alcohol are you talking about?

In alcohol such as wine blind taste tests have shown that there is little difference between the mid-level and expensive brands. A lot comes down to people's expectations instead of whats actually in the bottle. Although some of the truly cheap wines are god awful. Thats down to the quality of the grapes and processing.

For distilled spirits it depends on the type of spirit. Some require filtering to remove certain chemicals that can effect the taste. The extra filtration steps add cost to the production process and increase price. Aged whiskeys are more expensive because of the aging process. Its a heavy investment with a lot of risk to produce a product that you have to store for a decade or more before the first bottle hits the shelf. Higher quality spirits will usually have some extra level of processing/production that adds to the cost.

Beer tends to come down to the quality and variety of ingredients, as well as volume of production. A beer that is produced in gigantic vats a hundred thousand gallons at a time with basic cheap ingredients is gonna cost less than one brewed in a 500 gallon vat with a selection of premium ingredients. And the taste is purely a matter of personal preference. I know people that prefer miller lite to high quality micro-brews. They just have a taste preference.

The solstices are tied to the tilt of the Earth's axis. They are the points when the axis is either tilted the most towards or away from the sun. This change of the orientation of the Earth's axis has a larger effect on the seasons and climate than the change in distance of the Earth to the Sun.

Its A Wonderful Life has a nice bit on this.

Banks get money for loans from a couple of sources, but one of the primary sources is their account holders. When you deposit say $1,000 with the bank they don't take that cash and stuff it into a safe being kept there until you come back to pull it back out. They mark that you deposited $1,000 and then loan that money to another customer so they can earn a return on the interest. Banks rely on the idea that the majority of their customers will not come to withdraw all of their assets in a short time frame. They don't have enough money to repay all the money in their customers accounts. It's been loaned out or invested in other financial products. If too many people try to withdraw too much it can trigger a run on the bank as people panic and try to get their money out before the bank runs out of money to hand back.

In the U.S. there is a government protection for the majority of the populace against losing money due to a bank run. It's the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation). This protects up to $250k in each type of financial deposit category covered. So if an FDIC covered bank fails and you had $80k in savings there you won't lose your $80k.

Another source of funds is the Federal Reserve (in the U.S.). This is the bank that literally creates $$ and loans it to other banks. The cost of these loans affects almost all other loans down the chain. The Fed increasing its loan rates is one reason why mortgage rates and other loan rates have been rising over the last year-ish.

> as opposed to a CEO, who is money-driven.

Have you learned anything about the majority of modern politicians?

I don't know about the survey you are referencing, but I don't know anyone that trusts CEOs more than gov officials. Most that I know don't really trust either, but do tend to be more respecting of government institutions.

Personally, I'm not trusting of either anymore. Too many bad decisions and willingness to cater to political expedience. Or corrupt actions that aren't even really trying to hide the shiftiness anymore.