Active skills only. Martial arts? Sure. Dance? Absolutely. Law? Medicine? Not actually available. And you can only have a very limited number of skills on the chip at once, chip disabled or removed and you lose access. And it's a hardchip. No beaming skills to it, they have to be installed and they take days before you can actually use them.
All we're saying that tech actually has consequences. I've been getting the impression that you think technology will Solve Everything Forever, that it will somehow cause sweeping social change with no blowback whatsoever. That only perfect ideal outcomes will occur, and negative effects will pass us by. You seriously can't just ignore stuff like that.
I am not ignoring stuff like that. I am just saying that, in my opinion, restricting technology just plain doesn't work. I can't actually remember any historic example where it worked. Neither can I remember an example of technological revolution destroying a society. Closest I can think of were Luddites, but they were dealt with, and I think society learned their lessons.
Gondor calls for aid!
It's true. I was recently working in the mailroom at a small-ish university I'd never heard of before (1800 students), and the current cost for a year of classes there is about $48,000. It's been increasing by $1300 - $1400 per year (we'll call it $1350) pretty steadily for the last decade. So, for 4 years of education, current first-years will pay $200,100 ($48,000 + $49350 + $50700 + $52050).
So, basically, we need to develop psychohistory. I am all for it, actually. It exists in canon in some form (the whole cycles thing does allow Reapers to predict and observe patterns of societal behavior). And developing it might delay Reaper attack, if they see us as coming with a solution.
If you ever read the Foundation series by Asimov, that kind of prediction is the axis of the plot. They are able to predict social change and behavior of an entire galaxy over hundreds and even thousands of years into the future, without realtime adjustment, and are able to do it with an incredible accuracy, but are utterly unable to predict the actions of individuals. And it screws the protagonists over when a single individual outside the paradigm shows up.
That was partly a product of the times. It was written in the 1950's-1960's if I remember correctly. Back then, modern computing a la microchips would've been unfathomable. If someone thought of a computer, they either thought of mechanical computers like the Mk. I Fire Control Computer in use by the USN until it was retired in the 1970's, or the building sized monstrosities that were vacuum tube computers. Both were highly limited and incredibly specialized and market penetration for such was basically limited to the Military and Universities.
What I'm saying is, and I'm asking @Hoyr to back me up, that the large cities probably already have GARDIAN towers; like I've said, it's too stupid for them not to. The outlier towns, on the other hand, probably don't, and since the first thing the pirates do it take out comms they're the ones that get screwed. Putting GARDIANs in ~150 cities? Easy. Putting GARDIANs in thousands, or even tens of thousands of small towns, many of which are doing their best to hide from the government? Hard.
And we have failed to make a compromise.
Just to make sure. Are we giving this away for free too?
Neither do I. Unfortunately history shows this that Yog probably does,
Can I move to Australia?
)
Fine, whatever as long as its later. I don't even care what the economic issues/benefits around a race of immortals are, all I care about is the fact that the council will freak about the fact that many races will now have a knock off of the sort of population growth that made the Krogan Wars a possibility.
