If anyone committed cruelty, it's the homeowner by abandoning the pets and not paying for their protection as well as his own.

Animals are not people. It is negligence to force a human being to risk his own life solely to rescue an animal.

Entering a burning building is not safe. We have elevated the process from nearly 100% fatal to X% fatal, but X is still well above 0. Asking a person to accept the X risk for the life of an animal is ridiculous. And yes, I would think so even if the owner had been paying his fee.

Hospitals are legally exempt from the part of contract law forbidding contracts under duress. You can't say "But I was dying, they MADE me agree to this" for them.

If you pull up to the Last Chance Gas Station in Death Valley, and they want you to sign a contract to get the gas you need to get back to civilization, you may be under duress. No court in the land would allow anything outrageous in the terms.

A contract to fight the fire would work the same way. It would be nearly impossible to enforce a monetary judgement of any serious amount when the contract is signed under duress.

Don't forget collection. Hospitals lose an outrageous percentage of their non-insured accounts receivable to failure to collect. A fire department would likewise lose 30 to 60 percent of their "in-progress" bills.

This person is just lucky that his stupidity was costly, and not fatal.

Turn them in. You complain about "someone" not doing your job to fix a problem in your family (ok, your ex-family). Furrfu.

Even the most homeschool-friendly of states (such as Kentucky) allow state officials of one sort or another to investigate serious cases of educational neglect. In Kentucky, the local Director of Pupil Personnel does so (and (illegally) so do social workers). Give the officials probable cause, and they can find these people, require a written curriculum that matches state guidelines, and then arrest for truancy when that doesn't happen.

I personally prefer "lax" homeschool laws because Kentucky (at least) is notorious for having terrible school districts who start going broke because good parents pull out their kids (you know, the ones who pay per seat but don't cost much). Said districts then try to punish the good parents beyond what Kentucky law allows. OTOH, parents of troubled kids who pull their kids out instead of facing expulsion or "prison school" are encouraged to go, just to get their monsters out of the system.

I found a deal last week on the Brother HL-4040CDN (built-in Ethernet, color, duplexer, PCL 6, 500 sheet tray option, etc.) at OfficeMax, $279. For some reason, OfficeMax was showing it as discontinued last Wednesday, so the manager at the store sold me his display unit for an extra $28 off. Looks like they've got it back in stock now, for $399. IMHO, that's still a bargain, just out of the price range I could justify.

Pros:
* Built like a tank. Everything is built well (no little bits of plastic designed to break off).
* All the main consumables (drums, paper feed, etc.) are field-replacable.
* Toner cartridges are easy to refill.
* Standard PCL6.

Cons:
* As heavy as a tank. Plan on two-person carries.
* 64M of memory isn't a lot for a color printer. Scrounge out or buy a PC-133 SO-DIMM (laptop) and put in it first thing. I had a G4-era 512M SO-DIMM that it loves.
* 250-sheet tray is wimpy for a printer in this price range. Go on, take the extra inch, and make us a 500-sheet tray.
* According to the intertubes, printing Envelopes is an exercise in frustration. If you print lots of envelopes, go get something else.
* PCL 6 only. That's annoying, Postscript 3 should be an option there. (I haven't checked to see if it's there and hidden or not.)

Brother has end-of-lifed the 4040CN (non-duplexer), so if you don't need the duplexer, you might find a bargain.

I've not used it a lot yet (my big printing starts tonight or tomorrow, probably), but it really looks like a nice printer that's aimed for a 100k lifetime at least.

One strange thing: There is a Brother 4050CDN that fit most of the 4040CDN feature set, but appears to be UK only. The manual shipping with the 4040CDN says there is a 4040CN, a 4050CDN, and a 4070CDW (wireless). It claims the 4050CDN has Postscript and can take the 500 sheet add-on tray, and had a parallel interface. Brother is correcting some of their web site stuff showing the 4040CDN and 4070CDW, but the manuals are a strange change for Brother. They are usually much better at details than that. (It also lends credence to my first thought: they turned on duplexing on the 4040CN using software changes only.)

You don't give us a hint about your campus, but I'm sure that they have some form of backup system. Tivoli Storage Manager is big, bulky, and contrary, but in the hands of a paranoid pessimist (like our campus's TSM admins), it handles huge amounts of data and handles multiple copies all over creation. The systems I admin (AIX, SAP, DB2) regularly push 2T a day directly to an 8 drive LTO-3 library, while others are backing up to the 12 drive IBM "Jaguar" library in a different part of campus.

Check out main campus IT. At worse, you might have to buy them some LTO tapes or pay a per-meg fee, but you'll probably find a well-designed system that you don't have to maintain.

(If you do use TSM with Macs, go to the 6.1 client. it's a LOT better than 5.3 on the Mac. Also, run the first backup by hand. The client has memory consumption issues sometimes on the first backup.)