Every important organization in this business is listed on your second link except for Apple and Google. And, Google is purchasing Motorola Mobility, who is listed as a "Full Member". Many of the organizations listed on your second link make phones using Google's operating system, which cannot be said of Apple. Basically: in what way is this an organization of losers except for the fact that Apple is not on it?

The only reason someone would ask this question is to watch the comments devolve hilariously. You/we have all been trolled hard.

If you want to know what is wrong with Slashdot, look at this article:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/30/1233214/New-USB-30-Flash-Drive-Has-2-TB-of-Storage
The article is called "New USB 3.0 Flash Drive has 2TB of Storage".
To paraphrase what one commenter said, "It isn't USB 3.0, it doesn't have 2TB of storage, and you can't buy it."
Stop sensationalizing headlines. Consider not taking story submissions from users if it means the summaries will be less sensational. Try to read the article or watch the video before you post it. I mean, come on. The article's title was 100% wrong.

From the comments on TFA: On the video it says "Actually the one that we looked at on display was only 16GB but the technology behind that particular 16GB stick is capable of scaling to 2 Terabytes." In other words they'll have to wait years for smaller manufacturing processes to occur before a 2 TB drive is made. Well, of course we'll have 2TB flash drives someday. Submitter and Tom's didn't actually watch the video before using this headline.

I might agree with you it it wasn't for the fact that every part of the world that actually has abject poverty (the kind you talk about, where the country on a whole has no resources) has that poverty because the West (Europe and later the United States) caused it. We invaded them, and tried to force cultures on them that they didn't want, need, or understand. Then we took everything they had, told some of them that they were in charge and that we'd back them up if anyone tried to screw with them, and came back periodically to keep making things worse. The world is shit because people made it shit and we have to fix that before we can move forward. Stop thinking that people are poor just because they want to be and try actually thinking about how things got like this.

The two products they sell are an IDE for writing C#/.NET for iOS and an IDE for writing C#/.NET for Android.

What's the point of writing portable code (that is the benefit of using Mono, right?) if I have to buy two seperate IDEs to actually make use of it?

You don't agree with it, but you shower them with praise for the successes that they have gained by sacrificing the individual rights of the people. You might as well be one of those people trying to argue that Hitler fixed the German and/or US economy. (I don't care about Godwin's Law, since your opinion here actually does remind me of one I've heard before). I don't care if they have acheived "great stable economic development" (what's so stable about 20M+ dead of starvation in three years, anyways)- they did it through abuse and exploitation.

And while I'm here I'll send some props to a cool project trying to bring easy WPF GUIs to Powershell: http://showui.codeplex.com/

Alright, so I'm willing to accept that this is a strange position to take...but if I was asked to teach my girlfriend to write code, the first thing I would do would be to try teaching her Powershell. Powershell, for those of you who have never heard of it, is a sweet scripting language introduced by Microsoft in Windows 7 (although it is available for Vista and XP). I've heard it compared to Perl a bit; there's dynamic typing, little scope, and access to the lion's share of the usefulness of the .NET framework. I figure that if I gave her some of the basics (here's how to do some math, here's how to do string operations, here's how to find more information about this stuff) she'd be able to use the built-in help (it can be used as a command line or in an ISE, both installed by default in W7) and my advice to get her started. I just find PS to be incredibly simple to write in- not the command line stuff or their cmdlets so much as the basic math/string/IO crap that I find myself doing most of the time.

Hell yeah, PowerShell rules. I use it nearly every day for normal scripting language tasks- some small data parsing, the old awk/sed/grep flow, conversion between some simple file types. I've used it for more complicated stuff too. You really can't beat having the .NET framework at your fingertips, and aside from that it's really not that different from Perl all things considered.

Since Anonymous is still performing these attacks, I would say that any of them still face the immediate risk of arrest. I sure hope they all understand that, though. I'm gonna feel really bad when every high school and middle school (and elementary school?) in America has one kid get arrested for participating in these protests/attacks.

The distinction here is neither bullshit nor irrelevant. The difference between a firmware trojan and a hardware trojan has huge implications in the types of affected devices, in the potential places where it could have been inserted, and the manner of fixing the issue. Calling something "hardware" just because it resides in a non-removable part of the motherboard (how do you know the chip with the firmware isn't removable, anyways?) doesn't make sense. Maybe the difference is minor to you, but as a person who is researching hardware trojans at a large university, I consider the difference significant and relevant.