Black Hole Drive

It took a while before I got to thinking: how does one utilize the energy from a black hole?
There are two main ways that we know of. The first is the most obvious- its immense gravitational power. Even a small one with an event horizon the size of a golf-ball- like the one above- has the same attractive force as the planet Earth. At the layer just beyond the point of no return, light is forced to orbit, meaning that c is the minimum amount of speed required to escape this place. Imagine, then the power that could come from orbiting the black hole at the ergosphere?
The second is that of radiation. Contrary to popular belief, some things do escape a black hole. Since matter, energy, and information can't be destroyed or created, the hole emits some of this in the form of what's known as "Hawking Radiation". That, coupled with the intense x-rays from the decomposition of matter just outside the sphere of influence, can keep producing itself so long as fresh material keeps on falling into the singularity. Harnessing that can provide us with enough energy to sustain humanity for hundreds of thousands of years.
Of course, there are a few reasons why most extra-solar civilizations don't use this. For one, black holes are both hard to create in the lab and even harder to sustain due to the aforementioned radiation. Left unchecked, it will most likely dissipate in a matter of microseconds. On the other hand, too much and we'd be lucky to die from radiation poisoning before the black hole devoured the structure around it. It gets even worse once you realize that only a handful of the strongest, most expensive alloys can handle circular momentum at the speed of light, let alone all of the temporal anomalies that the hole causes as the structure gets closer to it.
Most civilizations and their colonies would like to think that they're capable of achieving something like this, but a fully-functioning version won't be galactically circulated for perhaps another thousand years at least. Then again, given how infinite the universe is in twenty directions that you can't even point in, somebody may have already developed this to its fullest efficiency

Rendered in Photoshop.