The best part of this article is in the comments. An original programmer on the game explains the reason that the bug was occurring and also why the code was unreadable (hint: they did it in assembly)

Ah, the quantum tunneling pinball!

We ran into this while writing the original code at Cinematronics in 1994. Since the ball motion, physics, and coordinates were all in floating point, and the ball is constantly being pushed "down" the sloped table by the gravity vector in every frame, we found that floating point error would gradually accumulate until the ball's position was suddenly on the other side of the barrier!

(To simplify collision detection, the ball was reduced to a single point/vector and all barriers were inflated by the ball radius. So, if the mathematical point got too "close" to the mathematical line barrier, a tiny amount of floating point rounding or truncation error could push the point to the other side of the line)

To mitigate that, we added a tiny amount of extra bounce to push the ball away from the barrier when it was nearly at rest, to keep the floating point error accumulation at bay. This became known as the Brownian Motion solution.

Since much of the original code was written in x86 asm to hand tailor Pentium U/V pipelines and interleave FPU instructions, but wiki says Microsoft ported the code to C for non-Intel platforms, I'm sure the code had passed through many hands by the time it got to you. The Brownian Motion solution may have been refactored into oblivion.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...

The title of this link is very misleading. Amazon is actually going out of its way to provide excellent customer service, and is being exploited by a scammer. It is therefore not "Amazon's Scam", but a scam perpetrated against Amazon.

As to whether or not something should be done, this is a sensitivity/specificity tradeoff. Too far in the other direction of distrusting customers and Amazon ends up like Paypal.

Take it with a grain of salt. They tried to sneak this by and it blew up in their faces.

While under oath, Kevin Systrom: “No, we never received any offers,”

Reality, Instagram had an offer from Twitter and Kevin Systrom had direct knowledge.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/disruptions-instagr...

That said, at least it looks like they're going to tweak the TOS change in favor of their users. But with Facebook pulling the reigns, we all know where this will end.