Well, my point wasn't that the original card is impossible to clone given physical access to the card. My point is that using only radio communication with the chip, it is not possible to clone it. I imagine that NFC stuff and the crypto module are isolated, and the hardware crypto module quite literally has only one command exposed, to generate a response to a challenge. So neither passive (when you hear the challenge and the response) nor active (when you can submit challenges yourself) attacks can give you the required key, even if you can find a bug in NFC that you can exploit.

As for complex protocols. I'm a logician working with proof theory. There have been precedents of full formal verifications of such protocols that, given a set of assumptions about the hardware, can exclude any possibility of a flaw in the protocol itself. Example 1, example 2. It's usually very hard, but can be done, and gives the same rigor as normal mathematical proofs.

Smart card security isn't new. So it's a reasonably mature concept, but it has usability problems in this application.

Contactless payments differ a lot from magnetic stripe swiping, invisible barcodes etc.

They are not static information but an active challenge-response authentication system. You cannot clone the chip; it has an internal cryptographic secret it does not allow you to access, only challenge responses. You can trick it into authorizing a purchase you don't want if you're in physical proximity, which is happening here, but you cannot save that authorization for later use, since the bank is issuing the challenge here, just like with a chip-and-pin purchase. The whole point is to ensure that this is really the actual card.

So the main problem is the lack of user interaction to go ahead with the purchase. A touch button on the card itself would help, but would destroy part of the convenience.

Then it falls back to the patent office to pick out which arguments are convincing, which is a pretty much similar task.

[citation needed], I can't find this line anywhere.

No, frankly, I cannot imagine millions of users with pitchforks and refund claims. I doubt this would motivate a lot of them.

It's not exactly an efficient sink, is it? Your only option for heat transfer "outside" is infrared radiation, since vacuum does not exactly support conduction/convection.

There is a difference between knowing and remembering. Especially remembering the first version of it.
And my comment was due to the fact that the original comment was at -1 and I had no mod points.

Mod parent up! Actually true.

More like, we should expect Minecraft Pro sometime later as a spin-off of this.

Well, not strictly everywhere..

Won't be enough. This only stops the sync, leaving the local data intact.
What you want is to delete the Chrome "User", which is there in the non-advanced settings, "Delete this user" button.

You seem not to be talking to each other. This was not at all about data on the Chromebook itself. Only the fact that Google Sync pulled very sensitive data by default.

There's a very good "rant" on preordering by TotalBiscuit after Colonial Marines came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5Uj4XIT1Y

FTFY