Michael Comberiate, a retired NASA engineer and manager of Goddard's Engineering Boot Camp said the Earth-bound Greenland Rover is similar to NASA missions off the planet.

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The camp's re-engineering awards went to a group that developed a technique to alter the ID numbers on Global System for Mobile Communications cell phones and to another team that found a way to defeat a biometric fingerprint scanning system.

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In the AI optimist camp, futurist and Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil also sees intelligent machines precipitating human extinction, of a sort, only in Kurzweil's telling, humanity is not exterminated but subsumed into a superintelligent machine.

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