A 6.4 metre wingspan is pretty impressive, but some of the pterosaurs were considerably larger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan of 10-11 metres and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatzegopteryx was about the same size.

You could say that, but you would be wrong. Cockpit windows remain a weak point aboard modern aircraft. Extensive and costly preventive maintenance programs reduce the risks, but they still regularly crack and leak, and occasionally fail spectacularly. A bit of Googling turned up this freedom-of-information response from the UK's civil aviation authority. It lists 88 pages of in-flight incidents of windscreen damage and failure that occurred - just in the UK - between 2008 and 2013.

This illustrates an important point. From a purely rational safety perspective, you don't actually need the electronic display system to be perfect, with an absolutely impossible zero risk of failure. You just need the system to be less likely to fail - in a way that causes a serious accident - than the known weak point (window) it replaces.

On the other hand, the number of accidents per passenger-mile is probably a lot worse in nuclear submarines than in passenger aircraft. Broadly speaking, an overall higher risk of accidents and fatalities is tolerated in the military.

And honestly, military submarines (or any submarines, really) tend to be much more heavily built than aircraft, and travel at much lower speeds, both of which tend to make crashes much more survivable. Consider, for example, the 2005 collision of the USS San Francisco with a poorly-charted seamount. The fast-attack sub was travelling at its maximum speed (probably around 40 mph) when it smacked into solid rock--that it couldn't see, as they had no windows. Nobody drowned; the ship didn't sink; all of the injuries (and the one fatality) were caused by crew members getting bounced about by the collision. Compare and contrast with just about any aircraft incident involving controlled flight into terrain, where aircraft crumple like beer cans and everybody dies.

In principle, there could be 'emergency' windows that were smaller or more awkwardly placed (perhaps even requiring the use of a periscope or physical light pipe) that could nevertheless still be used to land a plane in the event of a complete failure of the electronic display system. From an engineering standpoint, even a switch from giant wrap-around windows to small portholes is still going to provide some improvement in strength and weight.

That said, it's worth noting two things. First, modern aircraft are so heavily electronics-dependent (and fly-by-wire driven) that in the event of a catastrophic failure of onboard electronics, the loss of virtual windows may not actually be the biggest problem on your plate. Second, modern aircraft are often rated for landing completely blind (at suitably equipped airports); even if you lose the view from the entire front 'window', a landing on instruments is still a reasonable option.

A friend of mine works in a lot of internet marketing and used to do things like search optimization and whatnot. Trust me, no matter what user-based system you set up, people will work day and night to subvert it to push their products. Any sort of review or rating system would be corrupted very quickly.

So the system is inherently flawed.

I can't believe there's no way to design a more robust system of review that isn't prone to corruption. Maybe the FDA is that system, but it's an expensive and inefficient way to go. Of course though, any app that interfaces with a pacemaker or diabetic medication or something ought to be vetted by them. A "health and fitness app" less so.

So you're basically saying but someone could change the drone in the summary to something bigger and OMG DANGEROUS! Yeah good argument.
The other half of your argument is self defeating. Fires? Yeah because something that may catch fire is really going to kill you. Let me say that again, LiPo batteries do not spontaneously explode. Go get one and throw it really hard into the ground. Yes it may heat up, yes it may eventually catch fire, but if you get burnt as a result it will be because you got some really recessive genes which Darwin postulates may sort themselves out anyway.

In other news someone in my city stabbed someone else because they wanted a cab ride and they felt the cab stopped for the wrong person. Your little old lady has nothing on that, other than a case of the bat-shit insane. So let me commit the True Irish fallacy and say "No true sane person gives a shit". And that can be found by a quick Google search that shows the FAA hasn't done anything about individuals flying yet, only *attempted* to do something about a few commercial cases. So please, share with me your source on the steady stream of phoned-in tips, and the subpoenas and the cease & desist letters. No, Amazon and the guy who filmed the Tornado don't count.

By the way I like how you just pointed to the danger of drones, did you address the rest of what I was talking about? Think about it. With all those damn terrorists about we should ban fireworks and public gatherings. They are far more dangerous than drones.

Is this something that would respond to crowd-sourcing? I'm asking because I really don't know.

I've noticed that the reviews for apps have become much less reliable. Apple and Google have even started making it harder to break out the low-rated reviews on apps in their stores now, and there's so much manipulation of the reviews that it's impossible to fully trust them. And Apple and Google are far from blameless in this.

I wouldn't mind seeing some independent site that had sort of "wiki-reviews" of apps and medical apps might be a place to start. Let's see what some people with medical book-learnin' have to say about these things. We all know the wide range of quality of these things. This is one of those areas where anecdotal information would be pretty useful. I don't need to read peer-reviewed journal articles to know whether an app that measures and charts heart rate is useful, I just need to know if it does what it says it's doing. I've used an excellent sleep app for about a year now and I'm convinced that my experience matches what it's telling me, but I would have liked to know a little more in advance.

Having reviews on online stores was a good idea, but it's getting hopelessly corrupted. There's got to be some solution to this besides having the FDA have to chase it all down and delay the release of apps until they pass regulatory muster.

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

I'm so old, I still think an "engineer" is the guy who drives a train.

Clearly, a whale isn't going to be driving a train, though, so they must be the other type of engineer. But how do they work a slide rule with those flipper things?

Not him, this era.

A year ago, I would have said different, but I'm starting to get optimistic. Even the strange anti-corporate anti-authoritarian turn the Tea Party individuals have taken makes me optimistic.

What doesn't make me optimistic is the counter-revolutionary scum that's growing on the Left. Fortunately, those people are getting found out pretty quickly and exposed. The Obama dead-enders, the neo-feminists theoriticians and people who will tell you that privacy is "so 20th century".

I've got precious little energy left for those who would rather sit and point at "them" whether they be far-Left adbuster types or tea partiers. I had a bit of a revelation this weekend, hanging around a small Western Wisconsin town with a bunch of people who would consider themselves "tea party". They're figuring out that the Kochs and the mainstream AFP folks who've been funding the tea party don't really have their best interests at heart. They sounded a lot like the adbusters I know back home. Very strange times, when they figure out they've got converging interests, as they already have in Moral Monday parts of the South and anti-Keystone XL groups in Nebraska.

Or maybe it was just a nice quiet weekend in the country and I'm in a charitable mood. But you're right, fuck Obama. He's got nothing for me.

Actually the reason for that is not as nefarious as you think, and its the same reason for outsourcing construction, operation, commissioning, maintenance and many of the other activities various companies outsource.

The idea is simple. The companies make their money by getting shit out of the ground and selling it. Their value lies in the exploration rights and their proven reserves. Everything else is technical details. Most upstream oil companies are staffed with geophysicists, geologists, and anyone capable of holding a divining rod, as well as a few project managers to hold the whole thing together. They then borrow shitloads from the bank and sink even more shitloads into 3rd parties who will build, maintain and run the equipment. Then they can reap massive profits without having to actually have the expertise to do anything. Ever wonder why BP's oil spill involved a platform owned by someone other than BP, run by someone other than BP, drilling a hole which was cemented by someone other than BP, yet the profits of the operation (were it to have been successful) would have gone to none other than BP?

The entire industry is like that. Wastewater isn't complicated but there are plenty of specialist contractors who are willing to do it for you, so why waste the time and resources to doing it yourself, when you can focus on other things while also partially shifting liability.

Where can I find such a democracy?

Ahhh you must be one of those, "He mentioned guns so he must thing it should all be illegal, I better rebuff" types.

No, couldn't be further from the truth, you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I was saying that compared to getting killed by falling drones the above list is far more dangerous to the general health of people, and THEY ARE ALL LEGAL.

So everyone needs to take a deep breath, get some perspective and realise that getting killed by a flying drone is about likely as a terrorist attack. You should worry more about driving to a ski slope than dying on it.