It's an awesome name.

They knew what they were getting into when they asked "Hey Brits, what should we call our boat?". As if the most popular response was ever going to be serious, they're British. They may not have invented being smart arses, but they sure as hell refined it into an art.

i have watched a few of this guys videos,and while he has great energy,passion and a penchant for sly humor,but he tends to impose his understandings as somehow being more valid and accurate.

just take his example of the role of government.
he makes a valid point,and then solidifies his position by implying his view is set in this countries original documents.

which is fair,but only to a point...he literally ignores the federalist papers,which he actually references,and it was these 200+ papers and/or arguments that debated the actual role of the federal government vs the role of state government.

@MonkeySpank he is actually right.america is not a true direct democracy but rather a democratically elected representative republic.

after he makes some valid,if fairly biased points,he devolves into the gospel of capitalism and how it is a natural extension of our democratic republic.

really dude?
name ONE corporation that is democratic in any fashion?
you can't?
maybe that is due to the very obvious and plain fact that corporations are tyrannical by their very design.

this semi-educated man is just preaching the gospel of his religion:capitalism.

and referencing lenin like 20 times?
dude...read a fucking book on the history of the soviet union.

oh jesus..now he defending trickle down economics.....
sighs..how the zealots adore their doctrine of their holy texts,even if those texts are just figments of some economists wet dreams and has been proven to be an utter and glorious failure.

sanders is a democratic socialist,not like a denmark flavor but more of a FDR flavor.you know...the most popular president in this countries history and ushered in the most prosperous era in this countries history.

i could do a play by play on this man all day,and make him cry like a pretty little thailand ladyboy who cant afford his life-changing surgery into a actual woman.

well..he does have that douchebag hair.so he may already be looking for a surgeon.

yeah..im with @MonkeySpank,this dude just needs a good cock punch.

Well, that quite effectively negates the rule.
There should be no exception/exemption, because, as Drumpf has proven clearly and incontrovertibly, it's simple and easy to game those rules and get billions worth of free coverage just by consistently saying something insane daily.
Also, the exemptions on their face negate the spirit of the law, as it clearly favors the craziest, best connected, and/or most popular candidates to the exclusion of less popular, less connected, and/or less crazy candidates. Why bother enacting the law at all if the exemptions it contains negate it thoroughly?
That sucks.

Good to see password technology has improved significantly. His password was 1234 (coincidentally typed at 1:23), whereas the most popular password 20 years later is all the way up to 123456.

That's, like, over a hundred times better, right?

The years after the crash but before the appearance of Nintendo were Golden Years for my brother and me. We were picking up cartridges for our Intellivision for a dollar a piece (or less) at retail stores and sometimes for free at local garage sales. I know our game library was over 50 games at one point, which as kids we never would have been able to afford if not for the crash.

We also switched to PC gaming. My dad received one of the very first laptops (with an LCD screen) from his job and I managed to get Bard's Tale up and running on it. Some of my friends went the Commodore 64 route.

So after the crash, we never stopped gaming, really, and just transitioned to the NES when it came out. But of course games became more expensive then. We gave up on owning anything but the most popular games (Mario, Zelda, etc.) and instead would swap games with classmates to try out other stuff. Mom and pop used games stores also popped up around that time and usually we could trade in an old game for a new one with an out-of-pocket expense at around $5, which was around my weekly allowance at the time and let me get a new game once a week.

Don't want to be that guy espousing "it's Photoshopped" - but, I never trust these video game freakouts. Many of the most popular ones were staged... remember that kid that shoved a shoe up his butt due to WoW, then people remixed and autotuned the shit out of it? Leeroy Jenkins? All that shit was staged for views. Though, I still like re-watching that Leeroy Jenkins bit, that's a classic, regardless!

Monkey Island games were always wacky and difficult puzzles simply because it required you to think of objects in such ways as to break the fourth wall of the game itself. Guybrush and his infinite pocket space.

Also note, these are good games despite their frustrating bits. There were far more frustrations prior to the days where you are given dialog choices, when you were required to type in all of the dialog options using key words. Cough, cough, older Tex Murphy games and just about every text adventure from the dawn of home computers.

I loved those games, but many of them turned into puzzles that maybe one person in the family finally figured out after brute force trying thousands of combinations of objects with each other. I did that multiple times in the original Myst. I think there was one passcode that took close to 10,000 attempts. LOL!

Or how about games that had dead ends but didn't alert the player? Cough, cough Maniac Mansion. People could die, but as long as one person was left alive, the game never ended, even though only the bad endings are left. But it's not like modern games, some of the bad endings were themselves puzzles, and some deaths lead to a half good and half bad ending, like winning a lottery and then having a character abandon the plot altogether because he/she is rich and then THE END.

Those were the days. None of this FNAF shit -- which is really what deserves the infamy of terrible, convoluted puzzles...

Before video games became as massively popular as they are today, it wasn't always a requirement to make your game easily solved and you were not always provided with prompts for failure or success until many grueling hours, days, months, sometimes YEARS of random attempts. How many families bought a Rubik's Cube versus how many people solved it without cheating and learning the algorithms from another source?

Go back hundreds or thousands of years and it wasn't common for chess or go or xiangqi (the most popular game in the entire world TODAY) to come with rules at all, so only regions where national ruling boards were created will there be standardized rules; so, the truth, rules, patterns, and solves of games have traditionally been obfuscated and considered lifelong intellectual pursuits; and, it's only a recent, corporatized reimagining of games that has the requirement of providing your functional requirements and/or game rulings so as to maintain the value of its intellectual property. I mean, look at how Risk has evolved since the 1960s -- now there's a card that you can draw called a "Cease Fire" card which ends the game, making games much shorter and not epic at all. Easy to market, but old school players want the long stand offs -- I mean, if you're going to play Risk... TO THE BITTER END!

DRL's yt channel started yesterday with quite a few videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiVmHW7d57ICmEf9WGIp1CA/videos

This was their most popular vid that came out yesterday

i'll give it a shove *promote

Although I would never equate number of views on the internet (popularity) with quality. Have you seen which yt channels are the most popular. It defies explanation.

I think it's safe to say that's one of if not the most popular video everywhere.

The Dublin thing may be an issue of outdated IP addresses. I'll look into that.

There is some dispute about the copyright status of "Happy birthday". World's most popular song is not under copyright, according to lawsuit http://gu.com/p/4b38k/stw

Attorneys have found a songbook from 1927 containing Happy Birthday, with no copyright notice – predating Warner Chappell’s copyright by eight years.

"I didn't think I would ever be in position that I would ever have to take somebody else's life"

That's the opening quote, from somebody in the military flying armed drone strikes. I am gonna call that unrealistic expectations, the army and military are not about negotiating with the enemy, their purpose is the threat of violence and death should negotiations fail. If you don't expect taking a life to be part of military operations, you didn't understand the entire concept of a military.

Then it's compounded, with this gem of a quote:
"I thought we were trying to rebuild their democracy"
Where did there exist a democracy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or anywhere else he might have been flying a drone? Violent, repressive military dictatorships and stateless anarchy were the precursors.

Somewhere in between the cries to kill all Muslims and the Chomsky like claims that everything is the fault of the West is a middle ground I wish people would pay attention to and discuss.

There are parts of the world that are completely lawless, and for all intents and purposes have NO government despite the land itself falling within declared national borders. Tribal Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as many African states like Yemen and Somalia are relevant examples. There are powerful non-state organizations waging war from this regions. Al Qaeda and the TTP being only the most popular examples, Al-Shabab and Boko-Haram are others. These non-state entities are pushing ideologies that are not simply counter to western values, but that violate all UN agreed notions for basic human rights.

The question isn't drones good or drones bad. It isn't America good or America bad. It's not even killing good or killing bad. That's all just propaganda.

The real question is when powerful non state actors wage war with the declared goal of revoking many globally upheld human rights, how do we respond? The idea that drones should never be part of that answer seems equally facile to the idea that they always should be.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency, to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC, by replacing state winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes.

Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of pre-determined outcomes. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 80% of the states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.

The bill would take effect when enacted by states with a majority of Electoral College votes—that is, enough to elect a President (270 of 538). The candidate receiving the most popular votes from all 50 states (and DC) would get all the 270+ electoral votes of the enacting states.

The presidential election system, using the 48 state winner-take-all method or district winner method of awarding electoral votes, that we have today was not designed, anticipated, or favored by the Founders. It is the product of decades of change precipitated by the emergence of political parties and enactment by 48 states of winner-take-all laws, not mentioned, much less endorsed, in the Constitution.

The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founders in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. States can, and have, changed their method of awarding electoral votes over the years. Historically, major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).

Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in every state surveyed recently. In the 39 states surveyed, overall support has been in the 67-83% range or higher. - in recent or past closely divided battleground states, in rural states, in small states, in Southern and border states, in big states, and in other states polled.
Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.

The bill has passed 33 state legislative chambers in 22 rural, small, medium, large, red, blue, and purple states with 250 electoral votes. The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

NationalPopularVote.com

I like the top menu (the level where the Videosift logo is), it's nice. Can I suggest moving everything up there rightward so it's left alligned with where the video frame begins?

Also I like how you centred the video (got rid of stuff to the side of it) and made it larger. The centred-ness goes well with my OCD

As an idea for the side bar where you currently have Suggested/Related - how about possibly canning Suggested? I feel like Top, Unsifted, 'others in channel' encapsulates it already. How about instead having the following in a browser style tabbed menu (that wouldn't reload page when you select between them):

(1) Top, (2) Unsifted (expiring + beg), (3) Related, (4) Channel (maybe a filter that you select from a drop down of all channel from most popular to least), (5) Top Comments. You could re-use the buttons style you made for the old format for selecting "light/dark" or "newest/upcoming" but larger which would be good for TV/HTPC users.

Also for consistency, how about making that side bar identical in style to the items under the "Watch" menu up top? Actually, maybe only similar, with the same style but larger font and wider like they are now?

Rand was certainly not a great writer (as is often the case with those who write novels in a language that isn't native to them). As such, there's no comparison between Rand's use of English and say, Dickens' (but you could probably say that about Dickens and almost anyone else, John Oliver included. And Harry Potter isn't much better than The Fountainhead! Or most popular fiction for that matter.)
I doubt most of Oliver's audience have read Crime and Punishment, or The Brothers Karamzov, or The Sound and the Fury. I doubt Oliver's fans are any more "intellectual" or well-read than Rand's, quite honestly.

But Rand didn't even believe in small government. Just limited government. She was certainly no anarchist. John Galt was, perhaps, but not Rand. (The character is not the author.) Both Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand learned from Ludwig Von Mises, and they took what they learned in very different directions.

Yet, most of Oliver's audience probably haven't even read Rand and she's hardly that much of a contemporary topic worth talking about.. So why would Oliver (HBO) want to spend valuable broadcast time talking about her? She wouldn't be a "thing" if they chose to ignore it, and yet they aren't. Why? Might this bit be (the $beneficiary of those who are) uneasy with a potential Rand Paul presidential run, thus needing a straw man with which to link him with "libertarians" and Ayn Rand?

All this "OMG Rand!" going around, and yet her work continues to stick around long after she's gone.. And will likely remain so, given ^programs^ (and commenters) like this and their unwillingness to let it go.