New Scientist tells us about Facebook’s analysis of the “friend” relationships in their social network. “Only four degrees of separation, says Facebook,” goes the New Scientist headline. Here’s their summary:

A few months ago, we reported that a Yahoo team planned to test the six degrees of separation theory on Facebook.

I’ve talked about cloud computing before in these pages. It’s a model of networking that in some ways brings us back to the monolithic data center, but in other ways makes that data center distributed, rather than central. A data cloud, an application cloud, a services cloud. An everything cloud, and, indeed, when one reads about cloud computing one sees a load of “[X]aaS” acronyms, the “aaS” part meaning “as a service”: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on.

Today, 12 April 2011, is “Equal-Pay Day” in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

The New York Times has not just gone astray with its payment scheme; it’s gone completely off the deep end, gotten lost in the forest, fallen off the cliff and into a pit, and is knee-deep in any other mixed and fractured metaphor you can devise... linguistically.

Back in December, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission released a “Report and Order” specifying new rules related to network neutrality. The rules have since been challenged in court in separate suits by Verizon and Metro PCS.