Oh dear Winston, don’t you love big brother?

You are the Neo in The Matrix, a prisoner of the struggle you are so thoroughly convinced you chose to fight in. The Ghorman protester running in shouting your rebellion at the Empire’s beat into the plaza.

So completely brainwashed that even the concept of winning the fight frightens and freezes you.

Rebels who admire their oppressors make marketers salivate.

That’s you.

I’m the last person to ever ask for perfection. The problem is that educators are being told that video is so great. Then their schedules are crammed full by administration with hundreds of hours of video to show the kids. Leaving them with no time for reading, discussion, or project work. Time that is already taken by tests. So in the end, good educators who are probably way better than some of the awful standardized slop shown to children, have to waste hours showing mandated videos. Bad educators sit on their hands knowing they don’t have to become better because the video is babysitting the kids. This dulls the kids to learning and sends them into a false impression that learning is 100% passive. Sorry, but this way of using video is a net negative to education.

The better option is to recognize that just like everything in education, you need diversity and play to each strategy’s strengths according to the group being taught. Video is good to show things that cannot be demonstrated in class or to showcase highly specialized topics. But it has to be mixed with other strategies to be truly effective. What you must not do is pretend that video is always the better option for everything. Because that is absolutely not true. Specially since OP’s assumptions are wrong.

watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones

This has no impact on education. If the teacher present in the class is average, a better instructor on the video has a marginal effect, if any at all.

presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers

This has not happened and it’s mostly unnecessary. Specially as the mythical “team of top teachers” has never existed, it is not a thing that exists anywhere. Education all over the world is usually designed by committee, with all the associated flaws and setbacks.

falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education

The worst person for the most important part of the process doesn’t sound good to me.

We have the science, we know that in order to have a positive effect videos must be short, display things that cannot be ordinarily experience in everyday life, and present concrete single topic lectures that can feed interaction and discussion in the classroom, or provide guidance to project work and problem solving. They are a tool that makes good educators better, but for average educators who don’t know how to take advantage of it, it won’t have much impact.

Companies secretly love their software being pirated, in a marketing sense. It means they’re the most popular option. Microsoft’s attempts to stop Windows piracy were gestures to keep legal protections. So are adobe’s. It means they still get to keep the monopoly over the industry, even if the people pirating it don’t immediately give them money. It forces corporate employers to shell out big budgets for subscriptions. It means freelancers have to acquire licenses if they want to work with the big contractors. Every person who pirates their software to learn it, is another fish feeding their stranglehold on the graphics industry. It means they get to dictate what is the standard and force billion dollar companies to conform to them and not the other way around. It’s a blight. Piracy keeps the status quo.

The only point I will disagree on it’s about video. Today’s teaching actually over relies on video media precisely under the hypothesis you suggested. Unfortunately modern science knows that showing and telling is the lowest and most primitive form of learning. Effective learning happens when the student starts using the knowledge in interaction with others. For example practicing using said knowledge to solve problems and later teaching others about the topic. The old medical adage has been proven to be true: see (hear), do, teach. Video is less effective at knowledge transfer than reading and for the worse, reading proficiency is at an all time low. Precisely because of pedagogic inertia in adapting evidence based strategies and depending on tradition based strategies.

It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won’t melt.

It’s not so much a reward. It’s just the natural outcome when your intent is to stop crime, and not to be cruel with punishments. In most countries it is still culturally taboo, but treating people well is the first step to stopping them from committing crimes. Mental health attention is only possible when you work with person who is being treated with basic human dignity. Antisocial personalities of course are an exception who commit crimes and trespass social norms out of different reasons than common criminal but they aren’t actually that frequent or common. Crime is a complex multifactor issue. More often than not it is a mix of unmet needs, opportunity and the belief that they can get away with it. If you fulfill the needs of the person in a socially acceptable and healthy way then reduce the open opportunities for crime, you can stop crime before it happens. Punishment and its harshness, on the other hand, have absolutely no impact on crime rates.

All those bits of hardware and software detection, logos, distros, interfacing with the different system information, it’s all an ongoing effort. It’s essentially shooting at a constantly moving target.