10-114 Street shows. a. It shall be unlawful to give any exhibition of climbing or scaling on the front or exterior of any house or building.c. Violations. Any person who shall violate any provision of this section, upon conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not more than twenty-five dollars, or imprisonment for thirty days, or both.
To be fair, it was really more an exhibition of Vista's ability to use at least four colors at a time, rather than one of climbing and scaling.
Maybe Microsoft just paid the twenty-five dollars and put an intern in jail upfront. — BEN POPKEN
New York City Administrative Code Section 10-114 Street shows [onecle] (Thanks to David!)
]]>Far more annoying is the way the media rolled over for this rollout, from Meredith Viera's puffball interview with Gates on the Today show to David Pogue's bend-over on the the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
The former produced a telling revelation about Gates' favorite features, security (already somewhat compromised at beta stages, but subsequently "fixed") and the parental control feature that lets him mandate when his kids can turn their computers on and when they must turn them off.
And Pogue's comments about the "smoother, sexier" Windows Vista while acknowledging with a rueful laugh that yes, most of the new lifestyle features had been part of Mac OS X for years but as Steve Ballmer said, "You get (ie. steal) good ideas wherever you can find them.
But Steve Jobs must accept his share of the blame. If he had gotten past his massive ego and licensed the Mac OS years ago, we wouldn't be putting up with these idiot stunts trying to show how "creative" Microsoft is.
]]>I saw that, too. Imagine telling your cell mate the heinous crime that got you behind bars. I suspect this is a really old law back when $25 was a somewhat bigger deal. Or maybe they want to offer a serious punishment for crazy people who try to scale skyscrapers, risking their lives and costing taxpayers money when the fire department tries to save them, and so on.
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You can't get a permit to do something illegal. In fact, wanting to do something illegal is a reason to deny a permit.
I have a nice 4 page letter from the City law department from when I was hired to do this event for another client at another location. They cite many reasons for denying the permit (some of which would be applicable in MS's case), and the main one is the administrative code....
]]>But, incidentally, there were only 6 official abseilers hired for the gig.
Rumor has it that two giddy Warner Bros. staffers fashioned their own orange unitards from "Music and Lyrics" poster scraps (of Hugh Grant's face) just to join in the fray on Broadway, and they made it past security by posing as Michael Wolf's office clean-up crew. Zing!
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