I've listened to some LibriVox recordings of public domain works, notably A Princess of Mars. The price was right at the time, though the quality was, as you say, remarkably subpar. If I could have had a neural net read me the book instead of having to change with narrators changing every chapter, that would have been preferable.
That said, I have money now, so give me Todd McLaren narrating Altered Carbon for the cost of an Audible Credit every time.
From what little I understand, a Dyson Sphere would require so much material in terms of heavy elements that you'd have a great deal of trouble building a significant number of them even if you were raiding the entire universe for these materials. But like I said, I understand very little (and would love clarification).
There are alternatives to a classical Dyson sphere (Dyson bubble is one) that can be constructed to capture all the energy released by a star and which do not require much material [1].
I actually think you would use a series of nested Dyson bubbles to capture the energy via a cascade much like the electron transport chain [2] uses a multi-protein redox cascade to capture the energy of metabolism.
Huh. I actually used Bitcoin to buy Crashlands through the dev's Humble link since they said they get a larger cut there than through Steam, and I decided to cash out my Stellar (or whatever those morphed into recently) which worked out nicely for me. I guess they don't accept Bitcoin for some of their bundles which could then be resold on shady websites.
Not surprising given the incredible overwhelming number of people trying to play the game. I knew it would be huge, I never imagined it would be the phenomenon it is. (Go to a park at lunch or after work if you don't know what I'm talking about. Any park in the country.)
Especially that they launched US-only (?), but the whole world is playing anyway thanks to game's APK being spread on-line. I'm writing this from Poland, coming straight from 2 hours walk from work, catching Pokemon and leveling up on the way :).
It first launched in Australia, and is available in a few countries right now (Australia/New Zealand/USA). I believe the rollout to the UK/Asia/other countries is on hold due to issues with the huge volume of traffic overwhelming Niantic's servers.
Seems like this would be very easy for them to block since they know your GPS coordinates. They could just pop up a message saying "Pokemon Go is not yet available in your region," although, the good will demonstrated by allowing customers in other countries to play would probably be better than arbitrarily blocking them.
They could. If they did, they'd probably kill the game on the spot, or at least significantly curtail its popularity. As it is right now, the game is a global phenomenon, and it's getting immensely popular worldwide.
If you create a Pokestop, they will come. One thing Niantic did was turn certain businesses into portals - Pokemon Go could make many times more money with a similar deal.
"Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse."
- Penn Jillette
Of course, the full context of the statement transforms this from a head nodder into a well reasoned argument:
"It's because you get older, your responsibilities are different. Now I'm taking care of children instead of being a child. It makes the world look scarier. That happens to everyone."
That said, I have money now, so give me Todd McLaren narrating Altered Carbon for the cost of an Audible Credit every time.