So basically, you're saying if you crash your own car on your own property, you might be liable in the event that you decide to sue yourself?
You might not be the only person on your property, and just because somebody else has their property on your property doesn't mean you have free reign to damage it.
Personally, the way I'd have put it was that this election was the Republican Party/Romney's to lose. Much like Al Gore's attempt, they managed it.
I mean, I consider myself a moderate libertarian. Romney managed to convince me that he's a worse option than Obama. Now, merely by about 5 percentage points, with both scoring below 50% in what I'd consider an ideal president, but that's still significant.
Yeah, I view Obama as a slightly more liberal Bush, kind of like how Romney would have been a slightly more conservative Obama.
liberals crumbs like repealing DADT
Not gay. However, I've gotten the briefings on the effects of ending DADT. The end of DADT means one, and only one thing - you can no longer be tossed out of the military for declaring yourself gay.
However, because of the continued presence of DOMA and other laws, said gay military member can get a state recognized marriage yet the best treatment they can hope for their spouse from the military would be the same as for a friend - IE 'nadda'. No dependency status, no base housing, no married rate BAH, family seperation pay, medical, etc... Especially if the gay member is junior, they can be assigned unaccompanied housing in a barraks/dorm room.
If the member is transferred overseas, no passport/visa assistance, no benefits back home, etc... Even if the member is being sent to a 'gay friendly' country in Europe*.
It's not my fight, but I couldn't help but think that while repealing DADT is a step in the right direction, the system still screws such couples royally.
*Let's face it, there are some countries in the world where the US Military has permanent bases that you wouldn't want to advertise.
This move simply smacks of desperation from M$ after their blah launch of Win8 and the Surface tablet (plus the obligatory Apple and Google tablet launches around the same time)
You could put a positive spin on it in the sense that if MS patents it, but doesn't produce a product that does that, it at least has the effect that nobody else can do that until the patent expires. Well, as long as MS doesn't sell them a license.
Indeed. If you do not own a car, you don't need to buy car insurance. For the most part, leasing counts as 'owning'. Renting(IE the registration isn't in your name) is generally handled as a rider on the rental agreement - for like $10 they give you insurance.
It gets even more complicated - you can own a car, and as long as it never touches a public street you can leave it unregistered and uninsured, and drive it without a license; while drunk. I just wouldn't suggest getting into an accident with it, because the liability would remain.
Yep, I see this as a variation of the hitman scam.
Guy contacts you saying he's a hitman and has been hired to kill you. Offers to NOT kill you in exchange for beating the amount the person who hired him is paying. Generally speaking there is no actual hit involved, it's just a scam. That this guy backed up his threat actually makes him unusual.
On the hitman scam - A lot of the time they're quite easy to 'negotiate' down - could justify it in that not doing a hit is easier than doing one, on the other hand, if I have somebody that pissed off at me, couldn't they just hire another hitman?
Eh. I think we just need to keep all the hitmen busy killing spammers, malware writers, and scammers.
From what I've seen, they're more 'semi-standard'.
The connector isn't too bad, but you're going to have to make sure that the new laptop matches the dimensions of the old screen, can support the power draw(modern screens do draw less), uses the 'right' connector, and the hinge mounts match up correctly.
Even then you're most likely going to have mismatched casings.
It's probably easier to simply pay the price to get a new laptop that still has the higher resolution.
Generally speaking, I'd say that a still working vehicle isn't worthless. Totaled doesn't mean that the vehicle isn't worth anything any more - you have scrap metal if nothing else! It's just that the repair costs exceed the value of the resulting car, so in theory it's cheaper for you to just go out and buy another vehicle of the same general value and condition as the vehicle was before the accident.
I've seen testing - the electronics system will work for at least a few minutes, long enough to get the window down even when fully submerged. Your mileage may vary depending on details of the accident that results in submersion as well as age and make of the car and battery.
But unconscious AND the windows up is a bad way. I carry a spring punch - a hammer won't work as well under water. Useful not only for me, but if I have to be a rescuer.
As AK said, 'Halt and catch fire' happens fairly frequently with gasoline cars. After all, you're running around with 5-20 gallons of highly flammable fuel in them.
I'm another one who's seen a car engine catch fire - the latest was on the side of the highway as I was driving into town. Saw another incident in a gas station.
Of course, the stupidest was internet video of the woman who, when her engine caught fire pulled in to a gas station(not bad yet...) then STOPPED BY A PUMP!!!
Pulling into a gas station parking lot isn't a bad idea - they 'should' have a fire extinguisher. But don't stop by even more flammables! Though I'm willing to bet that the pumps are mostly explosion proof/armored against letting loose below 'hit by a bomb big enough that the gasoline doesn't really matter'.
Yes, 'totaled' means the cost to restore the vehicle to the state or better that it was in before the incident exceeds the value of the vehicle. Still, as you mention, that doesn't mean that partial restorations aren't possible. Full restorations are as well, they just require some sort of attachment to the vehicle to justify the expense. Or access to below market rate repair - free labor from doing it yourself, for example.
A submerged car can be fixed 'pretty well', the problem is that it's really tough to fix all the electrical and corrosion problems completely, so the car may no longer be reliable.
Now, because the car at least currently operates and looks like it hasn't been flooded, you get people selling them as plain old used cars. Same as with cars that have been in serious accidents and have hidden structural damage/problems. Which is generally fraud.
At the point you're displaying 2 A4 pages side by side, in order to be equivalent to the portrait monitor you're going to need twice as many pixals.
Using a 1920x1200 monitor, in portrait you get 1920 pixels of height, allowing a good deal of resolution for the page. 2.3M total pixels.
Rotate it back, and you only have 63% of the vertical resolution, and half the resolution. Oh well, in either case you're probably going to have to sacrifice some pixels in order to maintain correct proportions if that's important. Even if you have a 2560x1600 monitor, you're still only going to have 2M pixels if you're displaying 2 pages.
If you're into serious graphics design where you're looking to spend a few thousand on a ultra-color correct high resolution monitor, odds are you're going to be spending a lot of time wanting to have more resolution on a single page in order to get the final printed product 'just right'.
You do realize that there are settings in windows to make the font sizes and even icons larger, which allows you to keep the additional resolution do display more information in other ways?
Earlier this year, I ordered a 1920x1080 laptop from dell. They screwed up and sent me the x768 screen. I didn't notice when I was simply transferring files/installing some initial programs, but the moment I went to do some serious reading I noticed the lack of resolution and made them send me the better screen.
My previous laptop had a 1920x1200 screen, and I miss those 120 lines from the bottom. Unfortunately, it was 5 years old at that point and the power supply/battery charger system is no longer reliable. IE I plug the DC adapter into it and it wouldn't acknowledge it. Sometimes.
Step back indeed. I'd pay an extra $200+ for the higher resolutions, unfortuantly they're so rare today it's more like a $1k option.
Our current generation ICBMS are already capable of hitting within 50 meters of the programmed target. When Cheyenne Mountain was built, it was built to withstand close nuclear detonation from missiles where detonating within a kilometer was more the expected accuracy.
We can hit Cheyenne Mountain style facilities directly enough to destroy them already. That's without getting into fancy stuff like the nuclear deep penetrators we have locked up somewhere.
Indeed. My first thought was how this would help make inertial guidance systems better. Autopilots and such. But you bring up a good point about it being good for devices where you want to detect very small amounts of motion.
ICBMs don't actually need better gyros today - their destructive power renders the margin of error moot.
Do you really want the performance of your hearing aid to be subject to the processor load on your fucking smartphone? Do you want to randomly lose your ability to hear because your phone starts ringing, or some other app on your phone wore down the battery and now longer has a charge? Even if you MADE something like that and offered it in the market, nobody would buy it!
Beat that strawman! I count no less than 10 attacks on positions that I in no way hold, and your other post has another 4 or so.
Hint: I proposed only making the hearing aid configurable through bluetooth. That's a bit like complaining about not being able to play songs on an MP3 player unless you have it hooked up to the computer via USB. The only reason I suggested using BT is that apparently some aids are coming with it as standard. That gives you an industry standard interface to the device, that's primarily to allow the user to have his aid(s) provide headset functionality much like the standard BT headset that I use.
As for security, the easiest method I can think of besides the standard 'you have to press a button on the aid itself to enable pairing' would be to require a security code to be entered to change the programming, one that's hardwired into the device along with the serial number(4 digit pin isn't going to cut it). You might as well complain about the devices having BT functionality at ALL, because theoretically I could imitate the person's phone and fake a call to them. Perhaps with nasty noises. For some reason there aren't hordes of people out there looking to screw with somebody's hearing aids, apparently. Heck, there's not that much interference with BT headsets, and they generally lack any security.
To clarify - When I start talking about X, Y, Z type stuff I'm being deliberately generic. Deaf people have switched to texting over dedicated teletype type devices. Why? For the most part texting is faster, cheaper, and gets to their intended audiences better. However, other examples also exist, and for numerous disabilities/medical requirements/niceties.
"Just add bluetooth" changes none of that - especially when you consider that you can easily spend a couple hundred dollars on plain old consumer bluetooth headphones just for listening to music.
Just goes to show that you missed the context of my post - I was talking about aids that already have bluetooth installed on them. In the other thread it was originally YOUR response talking about $200, to which I replied that $600, THREE TIMES the price, would be more likely. And pretty much the very reason you state here - they ARE expensive little devices because they have to be so very good at what they do. When it comes to high end audio; price is pretty much what you're willing to pay(there's always somebody willing to indulge a sucker). But even if the hearing aides ends up being 4X the cost of a good set of BT headphones, that's still under a thousand, a third of the price of many aids.
But the hearing aid market is global, so volumes are actually pretty high. Because they're medical devices there's a lot of certification work that needs to be done to prove that they're worthy to be a hearing aid to the various government agencies. This is the 'regulatory capture' - Because they've been doing it for a while, meeting the regulations isn't very difficult for the current makers; but it makes it prohibitively expensive for a new player to enter the market. Add a dash of collaboration and they're free to charge in the thousands for their products.
Jeez, read my post, why don't you? The first two steps is simply a rough tuning; detecting those center points. The other stuff you mention is taken care of in stage 3(Clearer audio, not tone) and 4(See a professional; you're unusual).
I believe that there are such states, and yes, it's fucked up. Used mostly by shady dealers who use such clauses to ensure they get their 21% interest no matter what, even if the person improves their credit and could get a better deal refinancing.
Okay, so now you've added R&D costs for a home-configuration device, and need to test and certify IT to make sure that it's not accidentally blowing out someone's ear drums,
I was addressing only the configuration of such a device - not making it cheaper. Somewhere else somebody mentioned that the FDA shut down a homebrew EQ testing program. Such a program shouldn't be that expensive.
The moment you said 'Certify' you blew it though - remember, we're talking about a theoretical situation where the FDA isn't involved. No FDA - no certification necessary, no regulatory capture, costs go down. Despite this, I don't actually support NO regulation, just a 'we need to be a lot smarter about this, people'. Because the FDA really needs to streamline and update it's tests. Right now it's not concerned about security at all - wasn't it just a couple weeks ago that they found a pacemaker could be hacked remotely, potentially killing the person it was in?
The problem you have with the FDA is that it's so complex to gain approval that it slows adoption to the point that it's fairly frequent that common user devices gain functionality far faster than the FDA approved medical devices can. Thus you get a smartphone with app X being able to do task Y better then the medical device that costs thousands and is designed solely to do Y.
As for 'blowing out somebody's eardrums', well, that's what safety levels would be for, 'dozens of devices' would be more like 3, and being able to brick it through a bluetooth hack would be fairly difficult if the only configurable thing about it is the EQ settings, and if you wipe those out the fix is reloading the proper EQ from the settings saved in the computer at home.
If they're so cheap to design & make, then surely you could go start a company to build one, sell it for like, $200 a pair - a STEAL in the current "overpriced" market, after all - and make millions by disrupting the market and breaking the stranglehold of these colluding companies? After all, they're "just" a microphone, speaker, circuit board, battery, and case... right?
Regulatory capture. I'm not going to say that they'd be $200/pair, going by what I'm looking at I'd say more $600/pair. A lot of plain bluetooth earpieces go for over $100.
The expensive part today isn't so much designing a hearing aid. The expensive part is designing one in such a way that it gains approval from the FDA and other country's equivalents.
Hearing aids are right in the ear. It's been mentioned that many today have bluetooth. With that you should be able to hook it up to a computer and, sitting in a quiet room* follow the instructions given on the screen. Stage 1: Click when you hear a tone. Stage 2: Which is louder: Tone A or Tone B? Stage 3: Which is clearer: Audio A or Audio B?
Outside of unusual circumstances that should be enough to 'dial in' the hearing aid very well, in under an hour, without assistance.
Excepting this, looking at what's going on - the devices themselves are over a thousand, and that's WITHOUT developing and programming in a custom hearing profile. That part would be a separate bill.
*DQ's my computer room, but a tablet should work excellent.
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So basically, you're saying if you crash your own car on your own property, you might be liable in the event that you decide to sue yourself?
You might not be the only person on your property, and just because somebody else has their property on your property doesn't mean you have free reign to damage it.
Personally, the way I'd have put it was that this election was the Republican Party/Romney's to lose. Much like Al Gore's attempt, they managed it.
I mean, I consider myself a moderate libertarian. Romney managed to convince me that he's a worse option than Obama. Now, merely by about 5 percentage points, with both scoring below 50% in what I'd consider an ideal president, but that's still significant.
Yeah, I view Obama as a slightly more liberal Bush, kind of like how Romney would have been a slightly more conservative Obama.
liberals crumbs like repealing DADT
Not gay. However, I've gotten the briefings on the effects of ending DADT. The end of DADT means one, and only one thing - you can no longer be tossed out of the military for declaring yourself gay.
However, because of the continued presence of DOMA and other laws, said gay military member can get a state recognized marriage yet the best treatment they can hope for their spouse from the military would be the same as for a friend - IE 'nadda'. No dependency status, no base housing, no married rate BAH, family seperation pay, medical, etc... Especially if the gay member is junior, they can be assigned unaccompanied housing in a barraks/dorm room.
If the member is transferred overseas, no passport/visa assistance, no benefits back home, etc... Even if the member is being sent to a 'gay friendly' country in Europe*.
It's not my fight, but I couldn't help but think that while repealing DADT is a step in the right direction, the system still screws such couples royally.
*Let's face it, there are some countries in the world where the US Military has permanent bases that you wouldn't want to advertise.
This move simply smacks of desperation from M$ after their blah launch of Win8 and the Surface tablet (plus the obligatory Apple and Google tablet launches around the same time)
You could put a positive spin on it in the sense that if MS patents it, but doesn't produce a product that does that, it at least has the effect that nobody else can do that until the patent expires. Well, as long as MS doesn't sell them a license.
Indeed. If you do not own a car, you don't need to buy car insurance. For the most part, leasing counts as 'owning'. Renting(IE the registration isn't in your name) is generally handled as a rider on the rental agreement - for like $10 they give you insurance.
It gets even more complicated - you can own a car, and as long as it never touches a public street you can leave it unregistered and uninsured, and drive it without a license; while drunk. I just wouldn't suggest getting into an accident with it, because the liability would remain.
Yep, I see this as a variation of the hitman scam.
Guy contacts you saying he's a hitman and has been hired to kill you.
Offers to NOT kill you in exchange for beating the amount the person who hired him is paying.
Generally speaking there is no actual hit involved, it's just a scam. That this guy backed up his threat actually makes him unusual.
On the hitman scam - A lot of the time they're quite easy to 'negotiate' down - could justify it in that not doing a hit is easier than doing one, on the other hand, if I have somebody that pissed off at me, couldn't they just hire another hitman?
Eh. I think we just need to keep all the hitmen busy killing spammers, malware writers, and scammers.
I know I wouldn't have the first clue how to go about getting such things.
I'm so clueless about the drug underground that I figure that if I went looking for them I'd end up buying baking powder from a cop.
Not having done drugs, I figure I'd avoid buying them from a officer in uniform, but you get the idea.
Still has about the same accuracy at predicting stuff as high level economics.
Still, Life would be so much easier if most people at least understood the concepts taught in economics 101&102.
From what I've seen, they're more 'semi-standard'.
The connector isn't too bad, but you're going to have to make sure that the new laptop matches the dimensions of the old screen, can support the power draw(modern screens do draw less), uses the 'right' connector, and the hinge mounts match up correctly.
Even then you're most likely going to have mismatched casings.
It's probably easier to simply pay the price to get a new laptop that still has the higher resolution.
Generally speaking, I'd say that a still working vehicle isn't worthless. Totaled doesn't mean that the vehicle isn't worth anything any more - you have scrap metal if nothing else! It's just that the repair costs exceed the value of the resulting car, so in theory it's cheaper for you to just go out and buy another vehicle of the same general value and condition as the vehicle was before the accident.
I've seen testing - the electronics system will work for at least a few minutes, long enough to get the window down even when fully submerged. Your mileage may vary depending on details of the accident that results in submersion as well as age and make of the car and battery.
But unconscious AND the windows up is a bad way. I carry a spring punch - a hammer won't work as well under water. Useful not only for me, but if I have to be a rescuer.
As AK said, 'Halt and catch fire' happens fairly frequently with gasoline cars. After all, you're running around with 5-20 gallons of highly flammable fuel in them.
I'm another one who's seen a car engine catch fire - the latest was on the side of the highway as I was driving into town. Saw another incident in a gas station.
Of course, the stupidest was internet video of the woman who, when her engine caught fire pulled in to a gas station(not bad yet...) then STOPPED BY A PUMP!!!
Pulling into a gas station parking lot isn't a bad idea - they 'should' have a fire extinguisher. But don't stop by even more flammables! Though I'm willing to bet that the pumps are mostly explosion proof/armored against letting loose below 'hit by a bomb big enough that the gasoline doesn't really matter'.
Yes, 'totaled' means the cost to restore the vehicle to the state or better that it was in before the incident exceeds the value of the vehicle. Still, as you mention, that doesn't mean that partial restorations aren't possible. Full restorations are as well, they just require some sort of attachment to the vehicle to justify the expense. Or access to below market rate repair - free labor from doing it yourself, for example.
A submerged car can be fixed 'pretty well', the problem is that it's really tough to fix all the electrical and corrosion problems completely, so the car may no longer be reliable.
Now, because the car at least currently operates and looks like it hasn't been flooded, you get people selling them as plain old used cars. Same as with cars that have been in serious accidents and have hidden structural damage/problems. Which is generally fraud.
I'm not sure such a system, despite the improved targeting, would pass Geneva Convention scrutiny.
Though you have a point about improving the accuracy of smaller munitions, assuming the gyroscope ends up being small, cheap, and sturdy enough.
Do you do what I do and set the tab spacing to 2 characters?
At the point you're displaying 2 A4 pages side by side, in order to be equivalent to the portrait monitor you're going to need twice as many pixals.
Using a 1920x1200 monitor, in portrait you get 1920 pixels of height, allowing a good deal of resolution for the page. 2.3M total pixels.
Rotate it back, and you only have 63% of the vertical resolution, and half the resolution. Oh well, in either case you're probably going to have to sacrifice some pixels in order to maintain correct proportions if that's important. Even if you have a 2560x1600 monitor, you're still only going to have 2M pixels if you're displaying 2 pages.
If you're into serious graphics design where you're looking to spend a few thousand on a ultra-color correct high resolution monitor, odds are you're going to be spending a lot of time wanting to have more resolution on a single page in order to get the final printed product 'just right'.
You do realize that there are settings in windows to make the font sizes and even icons larger, which allows you to keep the additional resolution do display more information in other ways?
Earlier this year, I ordered a 1920x1080 laptop from dell. They screwed up and sent me the x768 screen. I didn't notice when I was simply transferring files/installing some initial programs, but the moment I went to do some serious reading I noticed the lack of resolution and made them send me the better screen.
My previous laptop had a 1920x1200 screen, and I miss those 120 lines from the bottom. Unfortunately, it was 5 years old at that point and the power supply/battery charger system is no longer reliable. IE I plug the DC adapter into it and it wouldn't acknowledge it. Sometimes.
Step back indeed. I'd pay an extra $200+ for the higher resolutions, unfortuantly they're so rare today it's more like a $1k option.
Our current generation ICBMS are already capable of hitting within 50 meters of the programmed target. When Cheyenne Mountain was built, it was built to withstand close nuclear detonation from missiles where detonating within a kilometer was more the expected accuracy.
We can hit Cheyenne Mountain style facilities directly enough to destroy them already. That's without getting into fancy stuff like the nuclear deep penetrators we have locked up somewhere.
Indeed. My first thought was how this would help make inertial guidance systems better. Autopilots and such. But you bring up a good point about it being good for devices where you want to detect very small amounts of motion.
ICBMs don't actually need better gyros today - their destructive power renders the margin of error moot.
First, your language and tone is unnecessary.
Do you really want the performance of your hearing aid to be subject to the processor load on your fucking smartphone? Do you want to randomly lose your ability to hear because your phone starts ringing, or some other app on your phone wore down the battery and now longer has a charge? Even if you MADE something like that and offered it in the market, nobody would buy it!
Beat that strawman! I count no less than 10 attacks on positions that I in no way hold, and your other post has another 4 or so.
Hint: I proposed only making the hearing aid configurable through bluetooth. That's a bit like complaining about not being able to play songs on an MP3 player unless you have it hooked up to the computer via USB. The only reason I suggested using BT is that apparently some aids are coming with it as standard. That gives you an industry standard interface to the device, that's primarily to allow the user to have his aid(s) provide headset functionality much like the standard BT headset that I use.
As for security, the easiest method I can think of besides the standard 'you have to press a button on the aid itself to enable pairing' would be to require a security code to be entered to change the programming, one that's hardwired into the device along with the serial number(4 digit pin isn't going to cut it). You might as well complain about the devices having BT functionality at ALL, because theoretically I could imitate the person's phone and fake a call to them. Perhaps with nasty noises. For some reason there aren't hordes of people out there looking to screw with somebody's hearing aids, apparently. Heck, there's not that much interference with BT headsets, and they generally lack any security.
To clarify - When I start talking about X, Y, Z type stuff I'm being deliberately generic. Deaf people have switched to texting over dedicated teletype type devices. Why? For the most part texting is faster, cheaper, and gets to their intended audiences better. However, other examples also exist, and for numerous disabilities/medical requirements/niceties.
"Just add bluetooth" changes none of that - especially when you consider that you can easily spend a couple hundred dollars on plain old consumer bluetooth headphones just for listening to music.
Just goes to show that you missed the context of my post - I was talking about aids that already have bluetooth installed on them. In the other thread it was originally YOUR response talking about $200, to which I replied that $600, THREE TIMES the price, would be more likely. And pretty much the very reason you state here - they ARE expensive little devices because they have to be so very good at what they do. When it comes to high end audio; price is pretty much what you're willing to pay(there's always somebody willing to indulge a sucker). But even if the hearing aides ends up being 4X the cost of a good set of BT headphones, that's still under a thousand, a third of the price of many aids.
But the hearing aid market is global, so volumes are actually pretty high. Because they're medical devices there's a lot of certification work that needs to be done to prove that they're worthy to be a hearing aid to the various government agencies. This is the 'regulatory capture' - Because they've been doing it for a while, meeting the regulations isn't very difficult for the current makers; but it makes it prohibitively expensive for a new player to enter the market. Add a dash of collaboration and they're free to charge in the thousands for their products.
Jeez, read my post, why don't you? The first two steps is simply a rough tuning; detecting those center points. The other stuff you mention is taken care of in stage 3(Clearer audio, not tone) and 4(See a professional; you're unusual).
I believe that there are such states, and yes, it's fucked up. Used mostly by shady dealers who use such clauses to ensure they get their 21% interest no matter what, even if the person improves their credit and could get a better deal refinancing.
Okay, so now you've added R&D costs for a home-configuration device, and need to test and certify IT to make sure that it's not accidentally blowing out someone's ear drums,
I was addressing only the configuration of such a device - not making it cheaper. Somewhere else somebody mentioned that the FDA shut down a homebrew EQ testing program. Such a program shouldn't be that expensive.
The moment you said 'Certify' you blew it though - remember, we're talking about a theoretical situation where the FDA isn't involved. No FDA - no certification necessary, no regulatory capture, costs go down. Despite this, I don't actually support NO regulation, just a 'we need to be a lot smarter about this, people'. Because the FDA really needs to streamline and update it's tests. Right now it's not concerned about security at all - wasn't it just a couple weeks ago that they found a pacemaker could be hacked remotely, potentially killing the person it was in?
The problem you have with the FDA is that it's so complex to gain approval that it slows adoption to the point that it's fairly frequent that common user devices gain functionality far faster than the FDA approved medical devices can. Thus you get a smartphone with app X being able to do task Y better then the medical device that costs thousands and is designed solely to do Y.
As for 'blowing out somebody's eardrums', well, that's what safety levels would be for, 'dozens of devices' would be more like 3, and being able to brick it through a bluetooth hack would be fairly difficult if the only configurable thing about it is the EQ settings, and if you wipe those out the fix is reloading the proper EQ from the settings saved in the computer at home.
If they're so cheap to design & make, then surely you could go start a company to build one, sell it for like, $200 a pair - a STEAL in the current "overpriced" market, after all - and make millions by disrupting the market and breaking the stranglehold of these colluding companies? After all, they're "just" a microphone, speaker, circuit board, battery, and case... right?
Regulatory capture. I'm not going to say that they'd be $200/pair, going by what I'm looking at I'd say more $600/pair. A lot of plain bluetooth earpieces go for over $100.
The expensive part today isn't so much designing a hearing aid. The expensive part is designing one in such a way that it gains approval from the FDA and other country's equivalents.
Hearing aids are right in the ear. It's been mentioned that many today have bluetooth. With that you should be able to hook it up to a computer and, sitting in a quiet room* follow the instructions given on the screen.
Stage 1: Click when you hear a tone.
Stage 2: Which is louder: Tone A or Tone B?
Stage 3: Which is clearer: Audio A or Audio B?
Outside of unusual circumstances that should be enough to 'dial in' the hearing aid very well, in under an hour, without assistance.
Excepting this, looking at what's going on - the devices themselves are over a thousand, and that's WITHOUT developing and programming in a custom hearing profile. That part would be a separate bill.
*DQ's my computer room, but a tablet should work excellent.