I'll get flamebaited for this but I had the exact same experience with Steam. It seemed like a great idea, but then I lost internet for a week, and Steam started up, told me it couldn't find an internet connection and click this button to start in Offline mode, at which point it told me that it couldn't start Offline mode because it couldn't connect to the server.
I've since started purchasing disc copies of the games I've already had the misfortune of getting from Steam when I can find them cheap and I don't bother with seeing anything else that is available.
It always amazes me that Steam is heralded as the future of PC gaming at the same time as everyone bitching about DRM, which Steam is just the same as the rest, it's just that Steam is blatant about it's constant need to authenticate, except of course when you put it in Offline mode and you get a period of unobtrusive gaming. Until next time it decides you're a pirate and needs to authenticate everything.
They have provided a revoke tool, as most of these idiots that use this sort of online authentication are forced to do as it's obviously a highly flawed setup. It's pathetic that we are forced to this and I honestly wish I hadn't supported the game with my money when they pull this sort of bullshit. Next time I think I'll simply wait until games like this drop in price or become budget releases so I don't contribute to undeserved high initial sales when they pull shit like this. Unsurprisingly the developers of Sacred 2 were forced to provide the same thing for a similarly idiotic authetication system.
There is a link down the bottom of this page to get the tool to remove an installation. I haven't had to use it so I hope it works for you.
Oblivion has no such retarded online authentication. By all means we should dump on the games that treat paying customers as pirates but be careful to make sure you criticize the correctly guilty parties.
Surely if there is one thing that every gamer of more than a few years (months? weeks?) has learnt is that everything is different when video games are involved.
Games that require quick reflexes can't don't improve those reflexes, but a sport that requires quick reflexes can improve them. Games that require strategic thinking won't improve your abilities in this area, but reading a book on war will help your strategic thinking. Playing games as a hobby and having background knowledge of genres or developers say, makes you a no-life loser, but watching movies as a hobby and having background knowledge of genres and directors makes you a movie buff.
Everything is different when it comes to games. This shouldn't be a suprise anymore.
The fact that you'd say that you'd kill people to save an animal is...
... the same as saying that you'd kill an animal to save another animal.
Yes, most people place the 'people' animals above the 'other' animals, but the fact that we're all animals. And when those animals become basically a part of the family there is an attachment similar to any other. How hard is this for people to understand.
I've never understood why it's acceptable to make jokes about, say, killing my cat, as though it's so funny. I'm sure that most people that have met people that don't like cats/dogs know what I'm talking about. If I were to joke about killing their children, I imagine they wouldn't be as amused.
Holy crap yes. You already had 5 points so I couldn't give you anymore. I've been moved from a high walled cubicle in the IT area which was all but silent when we weren't talking, apart from my coworkers keyboard strokes. Life was sweet.
Some of us got moved (there wasn't enough room for all of us in the project group) to an area with two foot high walls instead of full cubicles, which we share with half a dozen women from some other area of the company that requires them to be on the phone all day, or talking about their work, or talking anyway, and they have commercial radio on, and constant visitors.
All my distractions might be at home; games, books, movies, cats, but those are all voluntary (well except the cats) distractions. At work I have no choice but to hear the phone conversations, the talking, the radio, the constant interruptions.
I'm sure anyone that has worked on tech support has fallen into the hole of having to tell a user that this "time we are going to use the right mouse button to click", and from that point on being asked at every click request whether it's the left or right mouse button. Oddly enough I like these users cause it means they are actually paying attention, and nearly always it's a simple case of "It's always a left click unless I specify otherwise" is enough to keep them satisfied. Nearly always.
My stores are many and varied. If they aren't my personal stories I was in the room as it happened, nothing here is second hand after the event. Here we go :
I walked past a another tech support guy, head in hands, as he repeated his attempt to get the user to right click on the screen for the umpteenth time. Eventually he came out to me and said that he twigged to what was happening when they asked how they should be spelling 'right', if it was r-i-g-h-t or w-r-i-t-e. Turns out 'right click' meant for them to type out the word click on the screen.
Another person had someone place a 3.5 inch floppy disk in the CD rom drive, close the drive bay door and on the way in the disk got pushed so it fell sideways into the tray and wedged itself in properly. They couldnt' get it out and had to call out a tech.
I personally had someone tell me that they had lost their 3.5 floppy update disk "down the back of the drive". I frantically tried to tell her that a floppy disk drive is only marginally larger than the disk itself and there is simply no space for it to go, and that if the button on the face of the drive was flush with the face of the drive (and not pushable) then there was no disk in the drive. Regardless of me telling her repeatedly that it couldn't be the problem, she got a screwdriver, pushed it into the drive and wiggled it around in an attempt to find the disk. Oddly enough she didn't find anything. She then searched her desk for the disk, and found it underneath her keyboard. She then placed it into the drive only to find that it would no longer read it.
We also received the infamous email to support asking us to contact them if we didn't receive the email.
Another person I personally had was pressing the Start button with their finger when I was asking them to 'Press the start button". Last time I ever didn't describe it as "Clicking on the start button."
To be honest that was half my bad and why I think that in a lot of cases it works both ways, which is a less entertaining anecdote but one I always bring up when repeating these stores in this context. In fact I spent a lot of time shaking my head at other tech support people as they spent 5 minutes simply repeating the same command to users over and over again as if the 50th time of saying "Right click on the desktop" is going to result in some great epiphany where they suddenly realise what you're talking about. I had to spend a fair bit of time trying to drill into my fellow support techs that your commands to the user shouldn't be the end result, but the steps required to get there, reduced to their component elements as much as possible. "Bring up the display properties" will obviously confuse most simple computer users, but "Right click on the desktop, then select Properties" isn't much more helpful if they aren't familiar with the right mouse button, or the concept of the desktop, or that there is a distinction between the desktop and the windows/icons on the desktop. Asking the user to move the mouse to a free spot on the screen that isn't on a window or an icon, and then clicking the right mouse button is more wordy and takes a bit longer, but people are more likely to follow you the first time because you're not telling them anything complicated, just simple, seperate steps. And it also removes some of the ire when people are told to do something as though they know it all inside out. I know that a lot of the cases in this thread are more complicated or true cases of stupidity but I think that basic users cop more flack than they really should when a lot of tech support people don't dumb things down as much as they should. You'd be suprised how many end users appreciate things being simplified for them as opposed to being offended.
But I agree: idiotic DRM needs to go and publishers need to stop blaming piracy for their inability to make good games. I own a 360, Wii, and gaming PC (that dual-boots Ubuntu) and have plenty of great games for each platform. You're missing out if you write-off PC gaming.
Idiotic pirates and whiny crybabies need to stop blaming publishers for introducing DRM as though it wasn't in retaliation to a frustratingly high level of piracy of their games. And before the inevitably obvious response, the fact that the DRM doesn't work isn't the point. It never has been.
Having said that, writing off PC gaming is definitely missing out. There are a lot of awesome indie games, complicated strategy games and huge RPGs that are worth playing that simply wouldn't work outside of the PC. Racing games and platform/action titles will still always be the domain of the console, but the true gaming nerd will always need both for the full experience.
"What if" piracy levels remain the same? Who are you kidding? This game will get pirated through the fucking roof, even more than if it was loaded down with copy protection, because now all the people that would play games but not have access or knowledge on how to copy it will now have the ability. And they won't know that the Ubisoft guy is challenging people to actually be legit here. They just get FREE GAMES w00t.
And what the Ubisoft guy probably doesn't (or actually probably does) know is that people use every completely fucking stupid justification under the sun to pirate their games. And that the simple act of him saying "the people that claim that DRM is the reason that they pirate, will in fact pirate anyway", is now going to be used in yet another completely illogical justification for pirating this game. "Well he said we would pirate it, so I'm going to, I'll show him".
In fact, I'm almost certain he knows this is going to happen and they are prepared to take the loss on a game they probably don't see as being popular on PC anyway. He is setting you idiots up for the fall, you're all going to walk straight into it and fuck it up for all of us, as this is then used as the primary example of why either the PC isn't financially viable due to piracy, or why DRM should be strengthened and made even more intrusive, and all the way down you're going to be bitching about it being someone else's fault.
Fact is people don't like to be treated like criminals, and if they well they might as well act like one to hold up their end of the bargain.
Your apparent complete and utter retardation boggles me only slightly less than the fact that you were modded insightful. You are criminals you fucking moron. Let me attempt to spell it out for you.
Games come out. People pirate them. Nowadays it's publishers but it used to actually also be the people that were actually writing the games themselves, you know, those programmers that you always think are such cool guys for creating these games you love. Anyway, whoever it is, they get wind of this piracy in whatever magical way they find shit like this out. Maybe they look at torrent sites with their new releases and the leechers and seeds in the thousands, or maybe they roll chicken bones across a painted floor and read the results, the how is not important, whats important is that THE PIRACY CAME FIRST.
So the next logical step is to attempt to prevent this. Maybe back in the day it was regarded as a competition, as a challenge to crack the system. Nowadays all you whiny fucks expect everything for free, and when the companies implement copy protection (I really wish people would stop using the phrase DRM, because it's merely a blatant attempt to distance from the fact that all they are trying to do is STOP PEOPLE COPYING WHAT THEY HAVE WORKED HARD TO CREATE), regardless of it's effectiveness, the pirates cry like fucking babies about it all, and then every action that the publishers take is mangled into a completely retarded justification for piracy, which they would have done regardless.
You've proven this already with your comment, but a quick browse of the comments placed so far just cements it further. Hell, some other idiot near the bottom is claiming that no demo is a justification for pirating a game. Others use price. There are likely to be more, each as stupid as the last.
If it's got no demo, look up as many gameplay videos as you can, read as many reviews are you can, see if you can make an informed decision.
If you can't, or if it's too expensive, wait until it drops in price.
If you don't like the copy protection or your just not sure about it, don't by the fucking game. People copying instead of buying is how we got here in the first place. No, you can't determine lost sales due to illegal copying, but if the game is worth playing, then the people that put the effort into creating the game in the first place just would like to be paid for their efforts, but that's apparently too much to ask, so feel free to make up shit as you go along to make yourself feel better about fucking over the guy that created the game you're enjoying.
"In what could be the first step to backing down on the plans to censor the Australian Internet
You really believe that? Surely more likely is that this is being done to further remove the possiblity of yet more criticism of what is universally regarded to be a stupid idea so they can go ahead with it regardless.
Not that it really matters because we all know, as Senator Conroy has already revealed, that anyone that against this idea is in support of child porn anyway. I wish I could find the article to quote.
Yeah and to most of us this was blantantly the point from when it first started up. Forced to create stupid avatars, even given the option to take a photo for your gamer picture, 'games summary' pages that are simply even more achievement information than before, rows of constant marketing and HAY COME BUY MORE STUFF WHATS THAT YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME (yeah okay thats over there whatever).
They actively distract you from wanting to play a damn game. Even the 'Play Game' option itself is simply a simple disc picture with the game icon teeny tiny in the corner. Much better to go the prettier looking next page over with full screen game box pictures on your 'game collection' that then allows it to load all the related DLC that might be there for your game.
Yes, we appreciate that all you want is our money, and that's adorable, but it's starting to get blatant and kind of pathetically desperate, guys.
Maybe it's simply that the planetary "habitable zone" shifts over the life time of a star. Early on when the star is larger and crazier the safe zone is further out. Once the star settles down in a long term stable state the safe zone shifts in to a more permanent position and the planet(s) in that zone then get the chance to properly develop life as we know it. While the planet(s) that have now moved out of the safe zone become colder and any water that formed on the planet moves to say, the poles, and any or all life that developed that can't adapt or shift planets is basically fucked. Oh and once the star runs out of fuel and loses it's shit, then the "safe zone" basically moves to the next Solar System over.
Making it up as I go along appears to be working so far. The time frame involved would also explain why there isn't signs of life on Mars, given any signs of civilisation would have ample time to disolve away into virtually nothing (except maybe for Twinkies and cockroaches, those two things survive anything) and would also explain why all the documentaries I've seen about Mars show that all the women have three boobs. Well it really doesn't, but Total Recall was a great movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll get flamebaited for this but I had the exact same experience with Steam. It seemed like a great idea, but then I lost internet for a week, and Steam started up, told me it couldn't find an internet connection and click this button to start in Offline mode, at which point it told me that it couldn't start Offline mode because it couldn't connect to the server.
I've since started purchasing disc copies of the games I've already had the misfortune of getting from Steam when I can find them cheap and I don't bother with seeing anything else that is available.
It always amazes me that Steam is heralded as the future of PC gaming at the same time as everyone bitching about DRM, which Steam is just the same as the rest, it's just that Steam is blatant about it's constant need to authenticate, except of course when you put it in Offline mode and you get a period of unobtrusive gaming. Until next time it decides you're a pirate and needs to authenticate everything.
They have provided a revoke tool, as most of these idiots that use this sort of online authentication are forced to do as it's obviously a highly flawed setup. It's pathetic that we are forced to this and I honestly wish I hadn't supported the game with my money when they pull this sort of bullshit. Next time I think I'll simply wait until games like this drop in price or become budget releases so I don't contribute to undeserved high initial sales when they pull shit like this. Unsurprisingly the developers of Sacred 2 were forced to provide the same thing for a similarly idiotic authetication system.
There is a link down the bottom of this page to get the tool to remove an installation. I haven't had to use it so I hope it works for you.
Oblivion has no such retarded online authentication. By all means we should dump on the games that treat paying customers as pirates but be careful to make sure you criticize the correctly guilty parties.
Nah what you need is two scientists and two doors. One of the scientists always tells the truth, and the other always lies.
Of course, the answer is that you poison both the drinks, after spending the previous years building up an immunity to the poison.
At least I think that's how it worked.
In Gran Turismo, opponent cars absolutely WILL NOT BUDGE from the perfect line.
Gran Turismo : The Real Adelaide, Australia driving simulator.
Surely if there is one thing that every gamer of more than a few years (months? weeks?) has learnt is that everything is different when video games are involved.
Games that require quick reflexes can't don't improve those reflexes, but a sport that requires quick reflexes can improve them. Games that require strategic thinking won't improve your abilities in this area, but reading a book on war will help your strategic thinking. Playing games as a hobby and having background knowledge of genres or developers say, makes you a no-life loser, but watching movies as a hobby and having background knowledge of genres and directors makes you a movie buff.
Everything is different when it comes to games. This shouldn't be a suprise anymore.
The fact that you'd say that you'd kill people to save an animal is ...
Yes, most people place the 'people' animals above the 'other' animals, but the fact that we're all animals. And when those animals become basically a part of the family there is an attachment similar to any other. How hard is this for people to understand.
I've never understood why it's acceptable to make jokes about, say, killing my cat, as though it's so funny. I'm sure that most people that have met people that don't like cats/dogs know what I'm talking about. If I were to joke about killing their children, I imagine they wouldn't be as amused.
Yeah, unfortunately being pro-life around here tends to get you modded flamebait.
In fact, most stupid shit does.
Although I get it though, I mean, women's rights? Pfft, whatever.
And suddenly the name Quake 3 : Arena makes sense. Another day, another thing learned. I can go back to bed until tomorrow now.
It's called Deathmatch, and don't you forget it.
Holy crap yes. You already had 5 points so I couldn't give you anymore. I've been moved from a high walled cubicle in the IT area which was all but silent when we weren't talking, apart from my coworkers keyboard strokes. Life was sweet.
Some of us got moved (there wasn't enough room for all of us in the project group) to an area with two foot high walls instead of full cubicles, which we share with half a dozen women from some other area of the company that requires them to be on the phone all day, or talking about their work, or talking anyway, and they have commercial radio on, and constant visitors.
All my distractions might be at home; games, books, movies, cats, but those are all voluntary (well except the cats) distractions. At work I have no choice but to hear the phone conversations, the talking, the radio, the constant interruptions.
Humans would have also known to pack a sand wedge to deal with those sand traps more effectively.
In fact, with a geologist on board, they probably could've done even more science as other opportunites presented themselves.
You mean like "Hey! This planet is made of rock, lucky we packed that geologist!". I think they would have seen that coming.
...if we could unite and combine our strengths, like Voltron, rather than fight each other
like the Decepticons. All that internal conflict never helped them achieve their goals.
We could send robot after robot after robot...
Sorry, it had been too long in this space related article without a Futurama joke.
I'm sure anyone that has worked on tech support has fallen into the hole of having to tell a user that this "time we are going to use the right mouse button to click", and from that point on being asked at every click request whether it's the left or right mouse button. Oddly enough I like these users cause it means they are actually paying attention, and nearly always it's a simple case of "It's always a left click unless I specify otherwise" is enough to keep them satisfied. Nearly always.
My stores are many and varied. If they aren't my personal stories I was in the room as it happened, nothing here is second hand after the event. Here we go :
I walked past a another tech support guy, head in hands, as he repeated his attempt to get the user to right click on the screen for the umpteenth time. Eventually he came out to me and said that he twigged to what was happening when they asked how they should be spelling 'right', if it was r-i-g-h-t or w-r-i-t-e. Turns out 'right click' meant for them to type out the word click on the screen.
Another person had someone place a 3.5 inch floppy disk in the CD rom drive, close the drive bay door and on the way in the disk got pushed so it fell sideways into the tray and wedged itself in properly. They couldnt' get it out and had to call out a tech.
I personally had someone tell me that they had lost their 3.5 floppy update disk "down the back of the drive". I frantically tried to tell her that a floppy disk drive is only marginally larger than the disk itself and there is simply no space for it to go, and that if the button on the face of the drive was flush with the face of the drive (and not pushable) then there was no disk in the drive. Regardless of me telling her repeatedly that it couldn't be the problem, she got a screwdriver, pushed it into the drive and wiggled it around in an attempt to find the disk. Oddly enough she didn't find anything. She then searched her desk for the disk, and found it underneath her keyboard. She then placed it into the drive only to find that it would no longer read it.
We also received the infamous email to support asking us to contact them if we didn't receive the email.
Another person I personally had was pressing the Start button with their finger when I was asking them to 'Press the start button". Last time I ever didn't describe it as "Clicking on the start button."
To be honest that was half my bad and why I think that in a lot of cases it works both ways, which is a less entertaining anecdote but one I always bring up when repeating these stores in this context. In fact I spent a lot of time shaking my head at other tech support people as they spent 5 minutes simply repeating the same command to users over and over again as if the 50th time of saying "Right click on the desktop" is going to result in some great epiphany where they suddenly realise what you're talking about. I had to spend a fair bit of time trying to drill into my fellow support techs that your commands to the user shouldn't be the end result, but the steps required to get there, reduced to their component elements as much as possible. "Bring up the display properties" will obviously confuse most simple computer users, but "Right click on the desktop, then select Properties" isn't much more helpful if they aren't familiar with the right mouse button, or the concept of the desktop, or that there is a distinction between the desktop and the windows/icons on the desktop. Asking the user to move the mouse to a free spot on the screen that isn't on a window or an icon, and then clicking the right mouse button is more wordy and takes a bit longer, but people are more likely to follow you the first time because you're not telling them anything complicated, just simple, seperate steps. And it also removes some of the ire when people are told to do something as though they know it all inside out. I know that a lot of the cases in this thread are more complicated or true cases of stupidity but I think that basic users cop more flack than they really should when a lot of tech support people don't dumb things down as much as they should. You'd be suprised how many end users appreciate things being simplified for them as opposed to being offended.
But I agree: idiotic DRM needs to go and publishers need to stop blaming piracy for their inability to make good games. I own a 360, Wii, and gaming PC (that dual-boots Ubuntu) and have plenty of great games for each platform. You're missing out if you write-off PC gaming.
Idiotic pirates and whiny crybabies need to stop blaming publishers for introducing DRM as though it wasn't in retaliation to a frustratingly high level of piracy of their games. And before the inevitably obvious response, the fact that the DRM doesn't work isn't the point. It never has been.
Having said that, writing off PC gaming is definitely missing out. There are a lot of awesome indie games, complicated strategy games and huge RPGs that are worth playing that simply wouldn't work outside of the PC. Racing games and platform/action titles will still always be the domain of the console, but the true gaming nerd will always need both for the full experience.
"What if" piracy levels remain the same? Who are you kidding? This game will get pirated through the fucking roof, even more than if it was loaded down with copy protection, because now all the people that would play games but not have access or knowledge on how to copy it will now have the ability. And they won't know that the Ubisoft guy is challenging people to actually be legit here. They just get FREE GAMES w00t.
And what the Ubisoft guy probably doesn't (or actually probably does) know is that people use every completely fucking stupid justification under the sun to pirate their games. And that the simple act of him saying "the people that claim that DRM is the reason that they pirate, will in fact pirate anyway", is now going to be used in yet another completely illogical justification for pirating this game. "Well he said we would pirate it, so I'm going to, I'll show him".
In fact, I'm almost certain he knows this is going to happen and they are prepared to take the loss on a game they probably don't see as being popular on PC anyway. He is setting you idiots up for the fall, you're all going to walk straight into it and fuck it up for all of us, as this is then used as the primary example of why either the PC isn't financially viable due to piracy, or why DRM should be strengthened and made even more intrusive, and all the way down you're going to be bitching about it being someone else's fault.
Fact is people don't like to be treated like criminals, and if they well they might as well act like one to hold up their end of the bargain.
Your apparent complete and utter retardation boggles me only slightly less than the fact that you were modded insightful. You are criminals you fucking moron. Let me attempt to spell it out for you.
Games come out. People pirate them. Nowadays it's publishers but it used to actually also be the people that were actually writing the games themselves, you know, those programmers that you always think are such cool guys for creating these games you love. Anyway, whoever it is, they get wind of this piracy in whatever magical way they find shit like this out. Maybe they look at torrent sites with their new releases and the leechers and seeds in the thousands, or maybe they roll chicken bones across a painted floor and read the results, the how is not important, whats important is that THE PIRACY CAME FIRST.
So the next logical step is to attempt to prevent this. Maybe back in the day it was regarded as a competition, as a challenge to crack the system. Nowadays all you whiny fucks expect everything for free, and when the companies implement copy protection (I really wish people would stop using the phrase DRM, because it's merely a blatant attempt to distance from the fact that all they are trying to do is STOP PEOPLE COPYING WHAT THEY HAVE WORKED HARD TO CREATE), regardless of it's effectiveness, the pirates cry like fucking babies about it all, and then every action that the publishers take is mangled into a completely retarded justification for piracy, which they would have done regardless.
You've proven this already with your comment, but a quick browse of the comments placed so far just cements it further. Hell, some other idiot near the bottom is claiming that no demo is a justification for pirating a game. Others use price. There are likely to be more, each as stupid as the last.
If it's got no demo, look up as many gameplay videos as you can, read as many reviews are you can, see if you can make an informed decision.
If you can't, or if it's too expensive, wait until it drops in price.
If you don't like the copy protection or your just not sure about it, don't by the fucking game. People copying instead of buying is how we got here in the first place. No, you can't determine lost sales due to illegal copying, but if the game is worth playing, then the people that put the effort into creating the game in the first place just would like to be paid for their efforts, but that's apparently too much to ask, so feel free to make up shit as you go along to make yourself feel better about fucking over the guy that created the game you're enjoying.
"In what could be the first step to backing down on the plans to censor the Australian Internet
You really believe that? Surely more likely is that this is being done to further remove the possiblity of yet more criticism of what is universally regarded to be a stupid idea so they can go ahead with it regardless.
Not that it really matters because we all know, as Senator Conroy has already revealed, that anyone that against this idea is in support of child porn anyway. I wish I could find the article to quote.
It's like a little kid faced with a huge cake ...
I call bullshit. We all know it's more like a car.
I can only hope that maybe martians will do better than we've done.
I don't know if it's that cut and dried.
Remember that, theoretically, up to half the bears would be smarter than the average bear.
Although having said that, they are likely to be a lot more boo-boos for the humans to take advantage of and ... which way did you say the door was?
Yeah and to most of us this was blantantly the point from when it first started up. Forced to create stupid avatars, even given the option to take a photo for your gamer picture, 'games summary' pages that are simply even more achievement information than before, rows of constant marketing and HAY COME BUY MORE STUFF WHATS THAT YOU WANT TO PLAY A GAME (yeah okay thats over there whatever).
They actively distract you from wanting to play a damn game. Even the 'Play Game' option itself is simply a simple disc picture with the game icon teeny tiny in the corner. Much better to go the prettier looking next page over with full screen game box pictures on your 'game collection' that then allows it to load all the related DLC that might be there for your game.
Yes, we appreciate that all you want is our money, and that's adorable, but it's starting to get blatant and kind of pathetically desperate, guys.
I love me a good crazy conspiracy science "fiction" book. Why are you making us ask for the name instead of just giving it to us to begin with?
Maybe it's simply that the planetary "habitable zone" shifts over the life time of a star. Early on when the star is larger and crazier the safe zone is further out. Once the star settles down in a long term stable state the safe zone shifts in to a more permanent position and the planet(s) in that zone then get the chance to properly develop life as we know it. While the planet(s) that have now moved out of the safe zone become colder and any water that formed on the planet moves to say, the poles, and any or all life that developed that can't adapt or shift planets is basically fucked. Oh and once the star runs out of fuel and loses it's shit, then the "safe zone" basically moves to the next Solar System over.
Making it up as I go along appears to be working so far. The time frame involved would also explain why there isn't signs of life on Mars, given any signs of civilisation would have ample time to disolve away into virtually nothing (except maybe for Twinkies and cockroaches, those two things survive anything) and would also explain why all the documentaries I've seen about Mars show that all the women have three boobs. Well it really doesn't, but Total Recall was a great movie.
Yes, but it will take 5 minutes to get here, so he was half right.