International Longest Tweet Contest Seeks Entries 99
An anonymous reader writes "The 1st International Longest Tweet Contest is open for submissions until April 12. It looks to be a take-off of the famous Obfuscated C Contest. So far the record is 4.2 kilobits encoded per tweet, based on exploiting the fact that Twitter actually passes the full 31 bits of ISO 10646 (the international standard that Unicode is based on), not the roughly 20.08 bits/character of Unicode itself."
The original tweeters (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt [rfc-editor.org]
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html [faqs.org]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:still useless (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter has proven to be a quite useful tool for citizens to report that which the official media refuses (or is forced) to censor.
Point in case, the ongoing war on drugs in Mexico.
Entire cities are succumbing to the control of drug lords and their armed gangs, threatening the local media and governments to not report rampaging violent shootouts and gang wars. Twitter has been tremendously useful to warn the rest of the world about what is really going on in those places. Things that the Federal Government doesn't want the rest of the population to see because it puts this painful War and the Army (which has been deployed to openly fight the cartels ON THE STREETS) in a bad light, especially when said Army has been trying to hide its blunders (read: civilians killed in crossfire, mistaken for cartel members).
Re:still useless (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, this could be useful. Introducing TwitterShare, like RapidShare, but uses Twitter for back end storage! 525 bytes ought to be enough to store a sector of data plus some metadata so you can find the other sectors of data and reconsititute the original file. And then, TwitterDrive, a hard drive in the cloud(tm)!
It's not like there's much useful stuff posted anyways, so people posting their movies and other stuff would up the usefulness. And get the MPAA/RIAA to shut down twitter. That might be fun to watch.
Hell, Wikileaks could use it spread files easily - hard to block a big site like twitter.
Very interesting indeed.
Re:still useless (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, I guess I could update the entire world every time I eat something or run an errand... but to be honest, I can't see why anyone who doesn't already know would care
This morning I woke up at 5:45, had a shower and got ready for the day. I took the dog out, ate breakfast - just a peanut Nature Valley bar - nothing interesting this morning. I went off to work...at lunch I went to Subway and got a 6" Turkey with everything but hot peppers. No salt and pepper today - not for me! Ranch sauce! Now it is nearing 5:00 PM and I'm looking forward to a salad and possibly some chicken for supper. Not sure what I'll do this evening, but I'll post back tonight and let you know. Maybe watch some CSI - is it new this evening?
Check back tomorrow - will I go to Extreme Pita, Quiznos or Subway for lunch? WHO KNOWS!! That's the fun part!
Re:still useless (Score:4, Interesting)
The (US) Americans would catch on to your twisted deed when they think, "What's a Nunavut? --waaait a minute, he's making up names for countries now! This can't be Obama!"
Sure bet that no one in middle school knows what a Nunavut is, and by Foxworthy's Law [wikipedia.org] there must be a negative number of US adults who do. I'm not sure how these antiadults would manifest, but the ongoing census will probably figure it out. Maybe their annihilative contact with actual adults is the real cause of "suicide bombings". I dunno.
Twitter & Unicode (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Twitter is not Unicode-safe.
What happens is you can post a Tweet with astral-plane glyphs and it all appears to work fine, but mysteriously --- a week or so later --- the astral-plane glyphs just vanish. (I don't know if this happens to basic-plane glyphs; I haven't tested it.) I suspect what's happening is that they have different short-term and long-term storage systems, and the long-term systems don't handle Unicode properly.
For example, see this message [twitter.com]. That one lasted for about two weeks before the last word vanished. I should probably go hunting for a bug report form...