I can't help but wonder if Microsoft's just going to clam up since it seems like their ship has already sailed.

I tend to shop at odd hours and have always found that creepy. It brings to mind of various sci-fi horror films where they're going down a long dark corridor and the lights turn on as they start walking through, usually with a loud ka-chunk and buzzing.

That's STILL a better superpower than this poor guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Fall_Off_Boy

I believe the URL says it all.

Maybe it's a modded Osborne 1?

Similarly, my first thought was the Cottingley Fairies... these girls took photos of alleged fairies out in the woods and created a media uproar. People were brought in and the photos were deemed to be genuine. The catch is that the photos were real... and the fairies were cutouts.

Were there any storylines where that actually came into play? It would've been an interesting bit of foresight to implement that.

I used to do MTurk back in college when it was still in testing and there were numerous scripts that optimized workflow. If the work kept coming in, I could've clocked upwards of 40$/hour. The problem was that were so many people doing it that you could rarely get in more than 5 minutes or so with every batch, with batches only posted every hour.

Agreed. The sound effects are one of the things that my sister consistently highlights when introducing people to the games.

I rather had a jot of that the other day myself: wandering around a casino while waiting for other people to win (or lose enough to make them give up...) I heard something intensely familiar-- the music from Plants vs Zombies. There's a slot machine for it.

We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us. -CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Alpha Centauri (Fictional quote, by the by.)

Then you'd get a third, spiky-haired lawyer pointing, yelling 'OBJECTION!'

Disclaimer: This came up on one of the fictional police shows recently. CSI, I want to say. It sounds reasonable enough, so I'll run with it.

According to the show, a decent chunk of our biology consists of environmental factors. They ended up cracking the case of in vitro quadruplets, including one who was born ~20 years later, by comparing the antibodies present in each individual. Assuming they didn't live in the same place, they probably developed different tolerances to allergens as well.

Not a fan of the show, but there was only four stations, so... Seems reasonable enough to actually exist and be testable.

I had this problem when I first got my Google Voice number before. I ended up redirecting the number to the front office of the collection agency. After three months, I never got a call from them again.

I've played with this as a thought exercise, and my favorite result is that the entire universe, along with given rules, etc. started from a single random seed and propagated out following those rules at high speed. Then, some 4000 years ago, God sat down and started the actual interesting part of things.

Alternatively, for the Sim[X], Dwarf Fortress, etc. players among us, the first few billion years were in the loading screen and the last few thousand years have been a part of active gameplay.

Not that I actually believe this, but it's a neater explanation than a lot of the other answers I've gotten.

Dolphin?

Courtesy of Wiki: "The mahi-mahi or common dolphinfish (Coryphaena hippurus) is a surface-dwelling ray-finned fish found in off-shore temperate, tropical and subtropical waters worldwide. Also known widely as dorado, it is one of only two members of the Coryphaenidae family, the other being the pompano dolphinfish."

Alternatively, somebody made a pretty good novelization of the game. It covers most of the side-quests but, unfortunately, you do get only one of each of the major forks for obvious reasons: http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/pst-book.html