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If you're a smoker, you're not welcome in Santa Monica.

That's pretty much the message the city of Santa Monica sent to smokers Thursday as a new law went into effect making it illegal for people to light up within 25 feet of any apartment building, window or vent., the Santa Monica Daily Press reports. The law is intended to prevent people from smoking on patios and balconies of apartments.

10 Ways to Beat a Speeding or Parking Ticket

Living in Boston, Massachusetts, which is, I believe, the parking ticket capital of the world, I get more parking tickets per year than most get in a lifetime. We actually budget $1,000 a year to pay parking tickets. One might ask: Why not just park legally? And while in your town, that might make sense, in Boston, that is sometimes impossible.

A large yellow parking space with a sign reading “Mayor Parking Only” turned up in an area previously reserved for police squad cars Monday morning after Mayor Ted Franklin received a ticket Friday for parking in a no-parking zone outside the City Building.

Guy gets a parking ticket in the amount of time it takes him to get the cash to pay for parking out of his trunk.

Guy gets a parking ticket while standing at the payment box speaking with a reporter about parking rate hikes. Cop slithers away from camera and then comes back to deliver the ticket when no one is there.

Oakland parking officers were ordered to avoid enforcing neighborhood parking violations in two of the city's wealthier neighborhoods but told to continue enforcing the same violations in the rest of the city, according to a city memo obtained by The Chronicle.

Massive parking fines inspired one Australian man to create an iPhone app that lets users warn each other when parking officers are spotted lurking near their cars. Last year alone, he paid thousands of dollars in fines. The final straw came when he was ticketed in his own neighbourhood despite a parking permit that he pays hundreds of dollars for each year. The app lets users "sign in" and report sightings of parking officers with a single push of a button. Cartoon faces wearing a police cap then appear plotted on a map of the area, along with a notice thanking them.

An insurance worker who paid £10 to park in Wimbledon was given a £60 fine after her ticket ‘curled up’ on her window. After returning within her paid for time, she was "horrified" to discover a parking ticket for £60 citing a ‘failure to correctly display ticket’. "I can only assume, due to the absolute torrential rain on that morning, the ticket got wet in the walk from the ticket machine to my car and the heat of the car then made the ticket curl over."

In NYC, an arbitrary stretch of road which previously allowed parking, was suddenly changed to no standing any time. After the change, within 25 minutes, parking enforcement arrived and began issuing $115 parking tickets. When confronted about the sudden rule change and the fact that people did not have time to move, none of them seemed to care.

Furthermore, the official response basically told the owners of those cars that if they didn't like the ticket then they can fight it in court.