To the hardware, no. The software glitch that caused this has presumably been erased, but in millions of lines of code, I'm sure it has some relatives.
Airbus says...that's called marketing. It has other names.
If the aircraft is in anything other than direct law, then the pilots do not have ultimate control. That has nothing to do with flying visual or 'manual'. It means that the aircraft obeys the joystick if it feels like it. Normally, of course it does. This was an instance of a physical failure showing up a software issue. There is no instant switch that gets you to direct law. To get there you need the aircraft to detect enough failures to switch to it by itself, or you need to turn off multiple systems to force the change.
