GOG, because I don’t care about badges and achievements and other trinkets, but I do care about DRM

It’s an exploit path to a UEFI bootkit, so at the very least you’d have to throw your motherboard away or find someone that can physically overwrite it through an external flash programmer or something. And the patch should be delivered through a UEFI firmware update, so if your motherboard is no longer supported you would have to buy a new one. And for laptops and embedded devices having everything soldered in, the motherboard is basically the whole computer, so I don’t think it’s that much of an exaggeration.

I guess it’s true that if you have ring 0 access you’re boned, bug if your ring 0 access gets upgraded into ring -2 access you are even more boned. They put those security boundaries in place for a reason after all.

Sure, if they were designed that way, I would not call them defects either.

Just because all defect stock are routed to the US inventory, doesn’t mean that US inventory is made up of all defect stock.

That article (or rather, the article linked in that article) doesn’t contradict your intuition, just a specific interpretation of that intuition. The randomly generated data puts everyone around 50%, which is indeed what you would expect from randomly uniformly generated data. So the similarity that the generated data presents is supposed to imply the conclusion that “everyone thinks they’re about average, so their judgement is no better than randomly guessing (assuming that the guesses are uniformly distributed)”, which is a subtle difference from “dumb people think they’re smart” - the latter attributes some sort of “flawed reasoning” to one’s self-judgement, while the former specifically asserts that there is absolutely no relevant self-judgement going on.

edit: You would also be correct that this doesn’t disprove the previous explanation, it just offers an alternative explanation for the observed effect. The fact that data matches up with a generated model definitely does not prove that it is not actually caused by something else, which is one of the criticisms of that viewpoint. It is obviously easier to rigorously demonstrate a statistical explanation than a psychological explanation of course, due to the nature of the two different fields.