In the early 20th century, measured IQ gaps between protestant and Catholics in Northern Ireland was as large as that between whites and blacks in America today. Yet that gap has now completely disappeared.

What are good references for this?

There is a good article "Five reasons to blame Apple in nude celebrity photo leak", in The Hamilton Spectator. Here are the key points (read the article for elaborations).

1. The vulnerability is Security 101 stuff (even a good password, like “D0nM@tt1ngly!”, was still vulnerable).
2. The vulnerability was publicly known since May.
3. Apple defaults users into the cloud (and Apple makes it very hard to not store in the cloud).
4. Apple does not encourage two-factor authentication (it discourages this).
5. Two-factor authentication wouldn't have worked anyway (it is not actually enforced on iCloud).

BICEP2 were a bunch of young upstarts

You got that right. And the tender egos of the Planck team got hurt by the "young upstarts" outdoing them. Awww, how sad.

Fact is, the BICEP2 team got the result and published in a leading journal. The team hardly backtracked at all. For more on this, see the blog post by Lubos Motl: "BICEP2 gets published in PRL".

It is pathetic how established scientists try to protect their egos from "young upstarts".

Their civilian resistance effort also went down in legend

Indeed, “legend” is the correct term. Many of the most active members of the French Resistance were Jewish, who therefore had little to lose. Their names were changed from obviously-Jewish ones to more French ones, when the history was later written.

the [shoe bomber] was totally set up to fail from the very beginning and his 'bomb' was virtually fake

Do you have references for that?

Typhoon Ida (1958) had sustained winds of 200mph. That means that the energy in its winds was about 5% greater than the energy in the 195mph winds of Typhoon Haiyan (squaring speed to get approximate wind energy).

Moore's law has been superseded by Koomey's law:
the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.6 years.
Koomey's law seems to hold well.

For a good discussion of this, see the following post at Eros blog:
http://www.erosblog.com/2013/07/19/tumblr-admits-then-denies-hiding-porn/
Eros reported on this back in May, and here has a good discussion of the evasions and falsehoods from Yahoo!

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)....”
—H.L. Mencken

Moderators, I am the author of the above comment that has been moderated "Troll"; the moderation was apparently done on the basis of replying comments. I ask you to check what my comment said, before moderating it as troll.

Here is what the Slashdot summary said.

the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.

It ought to be clear from this that the Russian heat wave, in particular, is being blamed on putative global warming. Now, check the three links in my comment to confirm that they do indeed say exactly what my comment claims. The second link requires a password or subscription; here is an alternative link, from the American Geophysical Union (which publishes the journal):
http://www.agu.org/news/press/jhighlight_archives/2011/2011-04-13.shtml#five
You can confirm that the quote supplied in my comment is taken from that link.

The real trolls are the commenters who claimed that I was misquoting or misrepresenting. My comment is not a troll, and it should be moderated fairly.

I think that it says something about the current global warming debate that an accurate critical comment such as mine is moderated troll while blatantly false criticisms of my comment get moderated up to 5.

Yet more scaremongering from the statistically-incompetent Jim Hansen. Regarding the heat wave in Russia, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a press release entitled "Natural Variability Main Culprit of Deadly Russian Heat Wave That Killed Thousands"; the press release is based on a paper that was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Another paper, published in the same journal, concluded that "the heat wave falls within the realm of natural variability ... [and] appears not to be the product of long-term climate changes". Also, some researchers in Germany analyzed the data and published a paper, entitled "Large scale flow and the long-lasting blocking high over Russia", which says that the heat wave "appears as a result of natural atmospheric variability".

In short, the claim about Russia is false. The claim about the European summer of 2003 is also debunked. (I am not familiar with Texas.) And why does Hansen not mention extreme cold recently in Alaska?—is that also due to global warming? Bad weather has always existed.