

Can you copyright a tweet? - winanga
http://www.kottke.org/09/05/can-you-copyright-a-tweet

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noonespecial
Hmmm. How large would a book need to be to contain _all_ possible tweets?

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patio11
140 bytes means there are 2.70768525 × 10^126 (thank you, Google) possible
tweets.

I hope your book doesn't need a hydrogen atom to list each tweet, because
since the universe probably contains less than 10^80 of them, we'd run out
before you were finished.

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ubernostrum
That doesn't seem right.

Assuming:

1\. A tweet can be anywhere from 0 to 140 bytes.

2\. Each byte can have any one of 256 possible values.

Then the number of possible tweets is 256^0 + 256^1 + 256^2 + ... + 256^140
(the sum of number of permutations at each length in bytes).

If I remember my number theory correctly, the sum of the first n powers of a
number, k, is (k^(n+1) - 1)/(k - 1). Or, in this case, (256^141 - 1)/255.
Which is a much larger number than the one you just gave.

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derefr
A tweet is a zero-terminated string. It's 256^140, as the rest of the series
can simply be unified with their representations padded with zeros.

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ubernostrum
Depends on how you want to define a tweet, I guess, but 256^140 is still a
larger number than quoted in the post I replied to.

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patio11
I tried calculating 8^140. Eight bits in a byte, you know.

This is what happens at the end of a week of crunch. (On the plus side, you
guys aren't paying me for what I'm writing today.)

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brl
This link from the article is a lot more interesting than the article itself:

<http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/>

