That depends how you define "worked". Does it stop the images appearing on the internet? Of course not. Does it stop people viewing them? Please. What it does do is it means everyone who views or owns any of those images is now considered as viewing "extreme pornography" and lumped in with pedophiles. Now the government has a nice big stick to hit a large portion of the population should they wish.

Basically yes. You will have to sign up to a third party verification service (like the one owned by MindGeek, no conflict of interest there...) which will require photo id. There was talk of an "anonymous" option where they would see "porn passes" at the local corner shop for a tenner with a special code used to create the verification account, and the cashier is responsible for the age verification; Not sure if that is still planned or not.

I think it is likely someone specifically targeted ETC, because of their argument of "The block chain should always be completely immutable". I'm not sure if you're aware of the histroy of ETH/ETC but the short version is someone hacked a smart contract on ETH and stole a lot of money. It was decided that the transactions that stole the money should be reversed, so the people's money can be returned. However, reverting those transactions require a hard fork of the block chain and a number of people argued that the blockchain should be immutable and that the fork was a violation of that. The people who objected and kept the "original" chain are now called ETC, while the other chain is the one now known as ETH. This leaves ETC in a very difficult position. To reverse the double spent transactions breaks the core tenet on which the ETC chain is founded "the block chain is immutable". If they roll back those transactions, they aren't any different than ETH, just a minority fork with few developers and no differentiation. However if they don't reverse the transactions then the chain is forever comprimised and its highly unlikely anyone will want to use ETC.

I'm from the UK, and it's pretty standard here to have to pay extra to use you data allowance on tethered devices via a hotspot (I think I would have to pay an extra £5 a month to allow using my phone as a hotspot). In theory they shouldn't be able to tell, but they apparently use various things to infer if you are using your phone as a hotspot. Information on how they can tell is pretty sketchy because the providers know that it can be trivially circumvented once people know what they are looking for, so no one is really sure. The most plausible explanation I have seen is they look at the number of hops on the IP packet and if it is once more than they expected they block/reroute. Other theories I have seen include user agent sniffing (which seems unlikely, especially now most sites use HTTPS) and looking for different MAC addresses. There are apps you can install to allow tethering anyway, but I believe they can terminate your contract (since technically it is breach of contract) if they find out.

I'm just going to leave this here:
The case against quantum computing

Seems to be working OK to me.

Not necessarily. Once in the underground system you can freely move between the different lines at a given station. Plenty of people find the London underground confusing and take less than optimal routes through the system. Whether that is ideal or not isn't really relevant, the system is what is, and knowing if people are taking very long, circuitous routes through that system would be useful information.

An AI can only tell with maybe 70% accuracy if I'm a human or a spam bot, let alone identify 'abnormal' behaviours. Of course now with the internet it has access to billions of social interactions to establish a baseline:

*****
Possible subject identified....
Scanning social media to establish baseline behavioural norms....
Behaviours identified....
Subject found to not be dressing a cat in a strange costume or ranting narcissistically - Abnormality identified....
*****

Maybe not...

While I agree it is a shame, the reason people say it is a necessity for pharma, is the company that created that drug probably spent hundred of millions of dollars and a decade or more of R+D and testing to produce that drug. I'm not saying its right, but that's the way things are at the moment. If they couldn't get a monopoly on it then once they had spent all the money creating it, some other company would probably reverse engineer it and sell it for a fraction of the price. The end result would be that research and production of new drugs would grind to a halt because companies would most likely not get a return on their investment.

Thorium is not particularly radioactive. It decays via alpha (which travels very poorly in air, maybe a few centimeters) and naturally occuring thorium has a half life on the order of several billion years I believe. Basically to get radiation poisoning from this stuff you are going to have to grind it up and snort the stuff. Also for earlier commenters worried about nuclear explosions fro car crashes, don't be. Thorium isn't fissile, and while it is possible to make a bomb from it is hard work. It won't just happen to explode