Comment Re:Ya know... (Score 1) 383
Lots of engineering problems have been solved. What's your point? I'm not normally one to defend MS, but honestly - designing an XBox (even one called "360") to withstand rotation while reading a disc is really not necessary. Not every device needs protection from every possible mode of failure. Not only that, but in this particular case your examples do not demonstrate a solution to the problem because they do not involve the same kind and amount of motion.
A discman spins its disc much more slowly ("1X" in the old-skool models, typically around 500RPM according to wikipedia) than a DVD drive, and thus gyroscopic precession is much less violent. I haven't checked, but I'd also suspect the read head is not as close to the disc due to less stringent focusing requirements. A car CD player is positioned so that the axis is vertical so that the disc experiences very little precession (the axis of the disc's rotation does not change much, ever), AND it also typically spins at around 1X. An XBox may or may not be resilient to the type of shock a jogger or a pothole would give a CD player, I don't know, but shock is not the cause of the scratch in the OP's story.
Neither of those examples demonstrates resilience to the situation described in the OP - a small plastic disc spinning at around 6000 RPM (12x DVD) undergoing a 90 degree change of axis in the span of maybe around 3/4 of a second. Neither a discman or a car CD or DVD player ever faces that situation. Honestly, I'd be a bit surprised if a cheap solution for that particular engineering challenge exists on today's market. And any solution that is not cheap would be wasteful over-engineering for an XBox, because it's just not something an XBox needs to be able to do.