Amazon used to provide free networking for its readers... I think that it is very cheap to transfer text/"meta-data"... It might even be sponsored by the government...
For two programs that do the same thing coded in the same language, I would pick the one with the least amount of lines but that doesn't mean that less work went into it... Probably the opposite
I get your point, but if soldering is the only problem, just get a spring loaded solderless connector for JTAG pads? then it is about the same as USB for many more people?
but it's not physically broken... it's just a different way of connecting to it... so yes I would call that hard bricked, but not broken, since you don't need to replace components
I switched to duckduckgo a few months ago and it has been the first time that I felt that I was not missing something... I tried to switch a few other times before that and the results were of much lower quality...
JTAG connector is not that much different from USB at at stage... you just have to remove the case to access it or solder a connector to existing pins? I would call that hard brick... and if JTAG doesn't work, then it might be considered broken by some and need electronic part(s) replaced
to me, soft bricked means that you have to do something out of the ordinary to fix it, something that most people would not know how to do, even if it's just a software problem (maybe it's a new problem that had no known solutions yet)... http://unbrick.itcse.com/soft-brick-vs-hard-bricked-vs-broke...
and they could easily be revoked... If the government wanted to delete somebody, it would be pretty easy... just revoke all tokens and don't issue new ones.