Davenport, QUAD CITIES — Mid American Energy reports almost 15,000 Quad City area residents are still without power Friday morning, 96 hours after a powerful thunderstorm struck the region Monday morning.

The biggest concentration of power outages remains in Rock Island and Moline where 10,000 customers remain without power at 3 a.m. Friday.

Rock Island library officials were able to re-open the 30/31 branch yesterday afternoon, though there is still no computer access.

Western Illinois University’s Quad City campus is fully opening Friday morning, the first time the school has been able to fully operate since Monday.

The WIU-QC campus will re-open for business at 8 a.m. Civil service and administrative employees should report to work at their regularly scheduled times.

As you can see the mess continues for some down here and this is the busiest day of the year as the Bix Fest, and Ragbri are hitting town this weekend. So hotel,motel rooms for those without power are hard to find if they can be found.

I hope your day is going better folks see you later, Baldy

iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: “The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it’s bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: ‘Yahoo had an online music store?’… DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won’t deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market? The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a ‘privilege’ to be monetized.”

You have to love this another example of DRM jumping up and kicking the honest folks that tried to conform and use it. Just a perfect reason to say and with a loud and firm voice no more DRM you morons, Baldy

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It