One a larger scale, fashion is a reflection of the current cultural mentality - its a physical representation of reactions to current events, trends and ideas. In a very real way, it is a socially-conscious art that you can wear. Fashion forecasters look analyze things around them: "Green" inspires the color, current wars inspire military elements in clothing, and more currently, the recession inspires deconstructed black pieces.
There is a stigma which casts Fashion as vapid and illogical, but a serious look at avante-garde and haute-couture designers will show the opposite. Designs are highly intellectual and innovative, encompassing all variations of form and function, and the interactions between elements. Very commonly, a single stitch or element is given as much deliberation as a core feature in a programming language or a chip in a circuit due the angles which it must be analyzed.
I think people will be unwilling to pay at all, or the price will be driven so low that it is negligible. I can only think of a handful pay-for-answers services, and all of them have failed.
Furthermore, 140 characters is quite a restriction. By allowing only simple questions, the payments will be respectively low. Getting 10% of $0.10 questions isn't a way to make money - even at high volumes. They could have easily used their large user base for something that is much more profitable.
I don't believe Twitter has problems thinking of monetization methods. It's a specific problem where they want to 1) not alienate their existing users, 2) scale to their entire user base or large subset of their user base, 3) and make enough money that it's worthwhile. The sheer scale of the number of users makes it difficult to navigate, since any change will probably piss off large groups of users (look at fb, and the recent @reply fiasco).
Personally, I don't feel like a premium answers system will fulfill 1) or 3).
Again, this is article has a title which is extremely misleading. Ethnicity is improperly cited as cause, instead of traits that are commonly attributed to immigrants. Paris Couture was never "toppled" nor "redesigned" and this group did not exclusively create American ready-to-wear (to which the title infers).
If you look at the large trends of the last hundred years of fashion, the success is largely cultural (non-ethnicity-based) opposed to any other factor (this includes innovation through new fabrics or new sewing techniques which has been cited in the article as the determining factor). Fashion reflects the cultural and emotional sentiment of its target market, and does not impose any cultural designs, as the article stated at the end (basic law of demand). Furthermore, the Jewish-American "advantage" (tailoring trade skills, work ethic, innovation, optimism) can all be attributed to immigrants in general.
Since it would take an average supercomputer 5-6 days to generate the collision, I think I'm going to give the contest a rest (generating something close isn't useful outside the contest).
Another way to go about this is to sort huge rainbow tables by distance, which have been already created by a few reverse hash lookups ( http://md5.rednoize.com/ , http://hashcrack.com, http://sha1-lookup.com ) - You'll probably need to contact them directly or hurry up and make your own.
There is a stigma which casts Fashion as vapid and illogical, but a serious look at avante-garde and haute-couture designers will show the opposite. Designs are highly intellectual and innovative, encompassing all variations of form and function, and the interactions between elements. Very commonly, a single stitch or element is given as much deliberation as a core feature in a programming language or a chip in a circuit due the angles which it must be analyzed.