My friend, whom of course knew his hardware was perfect, immediately looked at me and was all "what did you do?!" and I was super confused as all I had done was written some code to let us control it remotely with a game controller. We go through my code, and he finds a place where I set two variables to true at the same time, and he explains to me that by doing that I shorted the robot's power transformer and made it catch on fire... :/.
What I am mostly known for these days is working on "jailbreaking" of iOS and Android devices. I can tell you that many early Android devices were easily bricked by just flashing a bad restore image from restore mode after having flashed a bad normal image. iOS is super resilient, and we have only very seldom managed to truly brick a device... one story, though, is quite topical: pod2g was demonstrating a new fuzzer he had written to do just what you describe to one of the NAND controllers to look for exploitable bugs... but on stage during the demo it managed to find just the right sequence of register changes to brick his demo device ;P.
Honestly, given the mental model of most hardware developers and how much trust is put in drivers, I'd just be glad that the e1000e merely bricked itself instead of burning your entire house down ;P.