 address the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, June 7, 2008. Presented by FreePress.net."
Al Jazeera English - News - Police Recruits Killed In Iraq: "An explosion has killed at least four Iraqi police recruits and wounded 23 others in Baghdad, police have said.
The recruits were gathered at a police recruitment centre on Muthanna airport street, western Baghdad, when they were attacked by an improvised explosive device(IED) on Sunday."
A Free And Self-Governing People Bill Moyers Vid...
Al Jazeera English - News - Police Recruits Killed...The fifth district meeting will be held this Saturday at Shatley Springs Resturant at 10am in Crumpler, NC. Please join us.
Ashe County Republicans gathered together Saturday, May 30 to fellowship with one another and pay homage to one of the party’s most beloved members.
The annual Lincoln Day Luncheon was held in the community building of the New River State Park’s 221 Access location. Well attended by the party faithful, the luncheon was an opportunity to begin the long trip back for Republicans from dismal state and national showings last fall.
As the state legislature goes to work on the budget for the next fiscal year, forecasts are dire and cuts may be deep, explained Sen. Steve Goss and Rep. Cullie Tarleton last Friday during a visit to Ashe County. Nobody will be immune to cutbacks as the state prepares to severely tighten its fiscal belt.
Goss and Tarleton are conducting a dual listening tour throughout their constiuency to hear what the people have to say and answer questions about the state’s economic predicament. Facing a $3.5 billion shortfall in the next budget, Gov. Bev Perdue is looking at widespread appropriation of funds from available resources, including the education lottery, freezing of projects, and cutbacks wherever possible.
The Ashe County Republican Party met for their annual convention Saturday, Mar. 7, at the Ashe County Courthouse with the sting of last November’s national defeat still hurting. The mascot for this year’s gathering, a wounded elephant donated by Tom Graybiel from Log Cabin Motors in Warrensville, truly symbolized the state of the party, according to Chairman John Wheeler.
“That’s the state of our party right now. We have been wounded and are down, but we have the ability to come back and be better than ever. But there is a lot of work to be done,” he said.
Goss & Tarleton tell you what to do…and where to do it.
A ban on public smoking inNorth Carolina is headed for a possible General Assembly vote, with Watauga County legislators lining up as sponsors for the bill.
Rep. Cullie Tarleton (D-93) one of 26 House of Representatives co-sponsors and Sen. Steve Goss (D-45) one of 14 Senate sponsors for the bill, which was debated by the House Committee on Health Thursday without a vote.
The problem with buying a model with a replacement SKU is that it means end of support is only a few years off.  SANs should have a longer lifespan in a data center than your typical server due to the rate of performance increase of CPU/memory vs the rate of space increase for storage at a locked price point. Never mind that replacing a server is way easier than replacing a SAN, at least in virtualized environments. (And way easier on my back).

We keep our servers for five years.  We aim to keep our SANs for seven years and mid-way through, add an additional shelf of disks.Everyone likes to bash Facebook.
Every day, some new story comes out about how Instagram is crushing it on advertising returns.
But like it or not, Facebook is here to stay. It’s the world’s most popular social media platform by quite some distance.
Businesses spend a fortune on Facebook advertising. It is one of the most potent forms of customer communication in the world – especially if you get it right.
Facebook grew revenue from advertising from a respectable $1.2 billion in the second quarter of 2012 to more than $6.4 billion just three years later, an average annual growth rate in the region of 50 percent per year.
Facebook didn’t get that kind of spectacular growth because it’s a big company, and that’s what big companies do. It did it by appealing to millions of small and medium-sized businesses and delivering highly targeted ads in a way that no other platform can, not even Google.
Why does Facebook advertising have such a bad rap? The main answer seems to be that most businesses don’t know how to use it correctly. They start with high hopes, investing significant sums of money into the platform. Over time, however, the returns that they hope for don’t materialize, and they end up blaming the platform.
Almost always, businesses fail because they don’t know how to make Facebook work for them. They don’t understand their target audience, and they don’t know how to configure their campaigns. No wonder things don’t work out.
This guide will show you how to avoid these mistakes and get your Facebook advertising off to a rocking start. You’ll learn how to get started, key industry terms, and how to measure performance.
First, though, let’s define what Facebook advertising is and what it is not.
Facebook might call itself a social network, but from a business perspective, it’s a giant data-collection device, finding out all kinds of nuggets about the people who use it.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the platform, once called people “dumb f****” for handing over their data, though he was 19 at the time.
However, his teenage self-had a point. Never in the history of advertising has a company been able to provide customers with so much information about their target audience. Television and cable companies don’t have websites where people post everything from their age to what their dog ate for breakfast.
Facebook, however, is such a platform. It is a treasure trove of data on audiences, and the main reason why advertisers are so keen to use the platform. With it, they can create hyper-targeted ads in a way that they just can’t with any other ad service. The better the targeting, the higher the conversions, and the higher the sales. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Facebook ads appear in users’ feeds, just like the rest of their updates. However, there are some differences between ads and regular posts. First, Facebook points tags the advertisement with the word “sponsored” in the top left corner. It also lets advertisers add buttons to the post that users can click to forward them to a landing or sales page.
There’s also a “like page” button in the top right, which doesn’t appear on regular posts.
On top of this, Facebook advertising is smart.
One of the great things about it is that it doesn’t disrupt the “flow” of the user experience. Users are free to scroll through their feeds without advertising continually interrupting the experience.
You might think that this would be a bad thing, but it’s the reverse.
Take YouTube, for instance. You’re sitting there, watching a video, and then halfway through a sentence, an annoying ad pops up and interrupts the experience. Not good.
Facebook isn’t like that. Users are free to continue scrolling as much as they like. Ads regularly appear in their feed, but they don’t annoy. In fact, many Facebook users find them helpful.
Facebook, therefore, understands the psychology of advertising. It knows that if it wants its platform to be successful, it must make its ads non-intrusive. So far, it’s doing well.
The company’s ads look very similar to regular content. Users, therefore, aren’t trained to ignore them. Instead, curiosity gets the better of many, prompting them to click on videos or read posts.
This little psychological trick is one reason why Facebook’s platform is growing so fast. Unlike in practically every other domain, users don’t have that knee jerk response to avoid advertising whenever they see it. On Facebook, they often want to consume it.
Let’s quickly cover some of the jargon you might encounter in your quest to understand Facebook advertising better.
Campaign. Facebook (and many other advertisers) use the word campaign to define the boundaries of a particular marketing push. The concept of a campaign is a little abstract, but in the case of Facebook, it just means ads tied to a specific objective. Your objective, for instance, could be increasing likes or converting prospects into buyers.
Target outcome. Your target outcome is what you want your campaign to achieve. Not all companies have the same goals. A startup just getting going might want Facebook ads that boost awareness, introducing people to the brand, but not necessarily selling anything. By contrast, an established double-glazing company might want to convert people immediately for direct sales.
Ad set. An ad set is just a group of ads that you decide to post on particular channels. For instance, you might create one set of ads to appear on Instagram and another to feature in apps on the mobile audience network discussed below.
KPIs. In marketing, KPI stands for “key performance indicator” and essentially refers to any metric that tells you something interesting about how well your business is doing, like revenue or profit per employee. On Facebook, KPIs refer to information about how well your ads are performing.
While advertising on Facebook can be incredibly lucrative, it’s not always easy to get started. There’s a