Comments on news posted 2004-06-23 09:37:46: According to Ars Technica, Microsoft has been granted patent number 6,754,472 for a "method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body". ..
Strangely enough given the pecuniary focus of Microsoft, which is something both its admirers and detractors would probably agree on, Microsoft Research is actually intellectually respectable.
I believe it was Roger Needham who said that he'd got fed up of inadequate research funding and insistence on short-term projects that could yield immediate benefit to industry, and that's why he was leaving the Computer Science laboratory at Cambridge University (England, not Massachussetts) and going to join Microsoft Research (though I can't track down the quote; I've got it on a piece of dead tree somewhere in the house, but you can't grep dead trees).
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