The real purpose of the DCMA -- and this ain't popular -- is to protect profits for American corporations.... Copyright law has never existed to ensure or even provide equity between the little guys and the big guys. It exists to preserve the wealth creation potential of artists and content providers.
I think you've got that wrong. My copy of the US Constitution says that congress has to power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." It doesn't say anything about a multi-lifetime license to corporate profit. It doesn't even say an author or inventor can transfer that right to a corporation. Arguably, it says that a copyright law is only constitutional if it promotes the progress of science and useful arts. By this measure the DMCA is undoubtedly unconstitutional.
The DMCA restricts your right to create useful inventions or writings. Under it you are not allowed to develop your own DVD player. You are not allowed to write a book giving detailed instructions showing how to build a DVD player, as you would need to include the DeCSS algortighm. You are not allowed to develop a tool that allows users to flip the embedding rights bit in a public domain font. By the same token you are not allowed the develop a tool that allows users to create their own fonts as it would allow the above usage.
The sooner this law is off the books the better. If it being off the books harms the value your stock portfolio, tough sh*t. The constitution doesn't guarantee you a profit there either.
The American dream involves freedom. If you don't have that, what good is wealth?
I used a similar technique on my XT compatible after I upgraded it with a VGA card with 256KB of RAM on it (long after everyone had thrown away their XTs). So long as you managed to avoid writing into the visible screen, a lot of it could be used for storage (with a bit of work on the page selection registers). I still have that machine. It's got 640k on the main board, 256k on the VGA, and 2 MB on an EMS 4.0 board. (2.875 MB total) There were times when I used every byte.
Of course there's a big difference between boosting a maxed out XT and expanding the capacity of your P4 2.8Ghz from 2GB to 2.064GB.
Re:How would the world react. . .
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
How would the world react if one morning they woke up to find that while they were sleeping the US government had become a totalitarian dictatorship with Pres. Bush at the helm?
I would guess they would react pretty much the same way they did on January 20, 2001.
Now if a person from a legitimate religion answered Jedi, and therefore has caused less dollars to go to his religious organization, I say he gets what he deserves.
That presumes that there are "legitimate religions." Who decide the legitimate vs the illegitimate.
I've seen Yoda fight with lightsabers. I've never seen Budda, Christ, Mohammed, YHWH, or Krishna do that. Which is more real?
If you buy a DVD of "The Little Mermaid" do you actually own the little mermaid? Can you resell copies of it? Resell distribution rights?
What do you get for your $20?
You get the right to watch a copy of that movie, in a certain way, on certain devices. You don't own "The Little Mermaid", but rather a mere copy.
You've missed a very important point, if you purchase a DVD you've also purchased the rights of fair use of that copy. These are the same rights you get when you buy a book.
Fair use includes:
The right to protect your purchase by making a functional backup copy.
The right to lend the media to another party without compensation so that they may view the contents.
The limited right to exhibit the contents without compensation. (You can invite friends over to view the contents.)
The right to space shift. (i.e. the right to use the media in any device anywhere.)
The right to time shift. (i.e. the right to use the media at any time.)
The right of resale.
The right to destroy the content.
Upon expiration of the copyright, the right to do anything you want to it, including selling copies.
The content providers (read MPAA, RIAA and other abusive corporate monopolies) have attempted to use technology, the courts, and the congress to limit these rights. The above rights are limited by:
Technological and legal impediments to fair use. (Copy protection, DMCA, etc.)
Making media that are specific to a single device or class of devices. (Region coding, DRM, Pd)
Making media that are time limited. (DivX, Pd, DRM)
Pressuring legislators to extend copyrights far beyond the limited times intended in the constitution.
The idea that copyrighted works are "licensed" is a relatively new invention. The "content providers" have been fairly sucessful in convincing the world that this is true. They've also been sucessful in convincing the congress and the courts that the constitutional reason for copyright is guaranteed profit, rather than advancement of the arts and sciences.
I have some knowledge of this subject. You've severely overestimated the amount of energy you need to receive in order to transmit a bit. If you encode the info by time between bits, you really only need to receive on average 20 photons or so over the course of a nanosecond to ensure good probability of detecting a bit with a triple coincidence detector like this one. Time between bits could be microseconds or hours, depending on the rate you really want. Twenty photons at 500 nm wavelength turns out to be 8E-18 Joules.
You've also messed up on your laser divergence calculation. A 1 mm diameter beam at 500 nm wavelenth has a diffraction limited divergence of 5E-4 (1.7 arcminute). You'd really want to use a telescope to transmit a large diameter collimated beam. With adaptive optics, the 10-meter Keck telescope could transmit a 40 milliarcsecond beam (divergence 2E-7). The diameter of the beam at 2 light-years would be 3.7 million km. Flux density per Joule of tranmitted power would be 9.4E-20 Joule/m^2. Keck has an area of 75 m^2, so it would receive 7E-18 Joules for each Joule transmitted. Therefore, the energy required per pulse is of order 1 Joule in order to transmit a pulse 2 light years. A small Nd:YAG pulse laser is 10 Joules and would be detectable 6 ly away. The largest ever built is 100 kJoules and could be detected 600 ly away.
You are correct that there aren't any mirrors a light year away, let alone and a couple million kilometers in diameter. You are incorrect in stating that it would be energy prohibitive to send data via laser to interstellar distances with current technology.
C-band is about 6 cm wavelength, 5 GHz on the
high end. That means you'll need to know your
antenna positions to a centimeter or better, so
you can phase the signals to 33 picosecond before adding them together. The better you phase match your signals the higher your effective gain will be.
An array of 17" dishes might do the job with the right feeds. You could phase match with coaxial cable. You'd need a different set of delays for each satellite you want to receive. You would need two or three arrays to cover the full sky. If you wanted a single fully steerable array that could choose anything on the sky, you're talking lots of electronics both for moving the dishes and forming the beams.
You could also do the job with a large number of dipole antennas, each with a bandpass filtered amplifier.... no need for multiple arrays, then,
but more expensive on the electronics side.
Of course, any of these options is far more expensive than buying a new house in a place
where you can put up a dish.:)
All statements of the kind in the posted article need to be taken with several grain of salt. Drake, and the recent Lineweaver (Nature) article, are significantly biased toward the optimistic viewpoint. "Rare Earth" is biased toward the pessimistic.
There is a middle ground. Despite working in the field, and having beliefs that life may be common, I would not expound those belief as a scientific truth. Both the optimists and the pessimists are baised by the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle states: the environment/universe appears biased toward the production of intelligent life because if it were not, intelligent life would not have arisen.
The "Rare Earth" types are biased toward the pessimitic because they see many coincidences in the way inteligent life arose here (i.e. the anthropic principle). They don't or won't recognize that they are biased by the unscientific belief that those are the only circumstances under which life can arise.
The "life is everywhere" crowd usually points to the rapid appearance of life on earth as evidence that life should be common in the universe. Of course it is possible that rapid appearance of life is a prerequisite to the appearance of life. It could be that atmospheric or oceanic changes could have made late appearance of life impossible. What some call the "reasonable assumption" that the probability of life arising on a planet is constant with time is both an unreasonable assumption and not a scientific basis for much of anything.
The real science is in the middle ground. Observe, don't assume. We should experiment, not pontificate.
Let's see... The company that verified the names of felons in the previous election charged $7000. Then the contract was given to the 'not so low' bidder for several million dollars. And they 'forgot' to do it. That doesn't seem suspicious at all.
For example, all of the reported allegations of intimidation or corruption in the florida 2000 elections were found to be false. But the
mainstream press never reported that (or at least never reported it loudly).
Let's see what the international press (at least some of which still does investigative journalism)
has to say on the subject.
BBC: [Regarding lists of preported felons that were prevented from voting] This is Database Technologies. This is the company that the
state of Florida hired to remove the names of people who
committed serious crimes from the voter lists. I have obtained
a document marked "confidential and trade secret". It says the
company was paid millions of dollars to make telephone calls
to verify they got the right names - but they didn't. There is
nothing in the state of Florida files that says they made these
telephone calls. So the question remains, why did the
Republican leaders of this state pay millions for a list that
stopped thousands of innocent Democrats from voting?
Bob Woodward is currently steering the Washington Post away from anything that might be controversial or require investigative reporting.
The basic problem with american journalism is that no newsroom in the country funds investigative reporting. The typical daily assignment for a reporter is to digest a half dozen AP wire reports and half a dozen corporate press releases into a half dozen articles. Anything that takes more than a couple hours to investigate is off the table. Following leads is reduced to "calling the corporate/campaign press agent." If a story is denied by a press agent, it is usually dropped.
Editor: Let's see... We've got a President who's campaign was mainly directed by his former president father. This father likely had involvement in illegal covert activities in previous administrations, but the President is witholding any documents from those administrations. The President was elected by the miscount of votes in a state that is governed by his brother. This brother was directly involved in choosing which votes would be rejected and which would be counted. The election was finally decided by the Supreme Court. The bulk of the members of that court were installed by the previous administrations in which the President's father served. The bulk of the senior presonnel in the current administration worked in the previous administration. Lot's of dots to connect there, but it would certainly take more than an hour and a few hundred dollars to get to the bottom of it, so let's ignore it. Besides, it would annoy the conservative owners of this paper.
Here, there's a new press release from Microsoft. Copy it verbatim.
There isn't exactly a huge market in 80's teen chick flicks in the DVD genre *grins*.
While geek favourites are almost guaranteed to make the transition, movies like "Heathers" and "The Breakfast Club" probably never will.
Damn, if "Heathers" is a chick flick, I must be a chick. I bought it on DVD this weekend ($9.99 at Target). I always thought of "Heathers" as "geek fantasy" rather than chick flick.
99% of the people who want copies of software don't have to worry about copy protection- someone else has broken it for them.
They merely need to use their P2P client of choice to download a cracked image of the CDs.
99% of the people who want copies of software want
backup copies of software they already own. Copy protection, aside from being rather pointless, attempts to restrict fair-use while not really hampering piracy.
The pirating of "Attack of the Clones" lends fuel to the film industry's efforts in Washington to crack down on piracy. While the studios' trade association steps up its enforcement activities, their lobbyists are pushing for laws that would require computers and consumer electronics to be modified to deter unauthorized copying.
The pirating of trade goods lends fuel to the Trade Federation's effort to crack down of smuggling. While the Trade Federation steps up its blockade of Naboo, their lobbyists are pushing for laws that would reqiuire spacecraft and surface transports be modified such that all occupants are chained to a bulkhead to deter cargo theft.
Anything else would result in chaos, given that MS has to conduct business in settling states and non-settling states simultaneously.
On the contrary Microsoft doesn't have to conduct business anywhere. Microsoft, which has been found guilty of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, is currently being allowed to conduct business in spite of that fact. It is perfectly within the power of this judge to shut MS down and recommend Gates and Balmer be tried for their parts in this crime.
Unfortunately that would require an independent judiciary...
Well, the method itself (and similar methods in server-side web scripting languages) was not the buggy part
The method and definition was not the problem. Many of the implementations had problems. Netscape 3 and 4 returned different values. Internet Explorer returned another. In 2000, you could expect getYear() to return 0, 100, or 2000.
Here's how my web site has been altered to handle the complaints from those using noncompliant browsers:
This depends upon where you think the bug was. The real bug was a problem with a loop in the code that described the division algorithm. When this code was compiled it generated an incorrect design that was used to create the hardware. In other words, it was a hardware bug caused by a software bug.
Let's say you're a scientist. You can five of your prestigious scientist buddies go out on a camping trip and witness a strange flying object doing crazy aerobatics that defy the laws of physics. Who exactly do you tell?
There's a problem with your hypothetical situation. The problem is that scientists never seem to witness strange flying objects defying the laws of physics. And those that do usually try to understand what they are seeing rather than pigeonholing it into to "aliens" category.
I'm an astronomer. I spend quite a bit of time looking at the sky, probably more than any non-astronomer here. I haven't seen any unexplainable lights in the sky. I've seen things I couldn't explain at the time (when I was a child). For example, in third grade I saw a silvery point above the western horizon one afternoon. I pointed it out to a teacher who pronounced it a weather balloon. All the kids called it a UFO. Of course, I know now that I was looking at either Venus or Jupiter, both of which are easily visible in the daytime if you know where to look.
I pull this joke quite often when I'm in a crowd. I'll find Venus or Jupiter and start pointing at it. Most people will describe it as moving in a way that describes the laws of physics. What's really happening is that without nearby references it appears to move. It's hard to find, so if you look away and back, it may have seemed to disappear. The problem is that untrained people are very poor observers, especially if they don't understand what they are seeing and how their perceptions color their understanding.
Even professionals like pilots are susceptible to misidentifying objects in the sky. Reports of pilots taking evasive action to avoid hitting Venus are common.
Until there is something beyond eyewitness report and doctored photos, there's very little to investigate.
Slashdot Mirror
This site explains it all in terms everyone can understand.
The real purpose of the DCMA -- and this ain't popular -- is to protect profits for American corporations. ... Copyright law has never existed to ensure or even provide equity between the little guys and the big guys. It exists to preserve the wealth creation potential of artists and content providers.
I think you've got that wrong. My copy of the US Constitution says that congress has to power to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." It doesn't say anything about a multi-lifetime license to corporate profit. It doesn't even say an author or inventor can transfer that right to a corporation. Arguably, it says that a copyright law is only constitutional if it promotes the progress of science and useful arts. By this measure the DMCA is undoubtedly unconstitutional.
The DMCA restricts your right to create useful inventions or writings. Under it you are not allowed to develop your own DVD player. You are not allowed to write a book giving detailed instructions showing how to build a DVD player, as you would need to include the DeCSS algortighm.
You are not allowed to develop a tool that allows users to flip the embedding rights bit in a public domain font. By the same token you are not allowed the develop a tool that allows users to create their own fonts as it would allow the above usage.
The sooner this law is off the books the better. If it being off the books harms the value your stock portfolio, tough sh*t. The constitution doesn't guarantee you a profit there either.
The American dream involves freedom. If you don't have that, what good is wealth?
I used a similar technique on my XT compatible after I upgraded it with a VGA card with 256KB of RAM on it (long after everyone had thrown away their XTs). So long as you managed to avoid writing into the visible screen, a lot of it could be used for storage (with a bit of work on the page selection registers). I still have that machine. It's got 640k on the main board, 256k on the VGA, and 2 MB on an EMS 4.0 board. (2.875 MB total) There were times when I used every byte.
Of course there's a big difference between boosting a maxed out XT and expanding the capacity of your P4 2.8Ghz from 2GB to 2.064GB.
How would the world react if one morning they woke up to find that while they were sleeping the US government had become a totalitarian dictatorship with Pres. Bush at the helm?
I would guess they would react pretty much the same way they did on January 20, 2001.
Now if a person from a legitimate religion answered Jedi, and therefore has caused less dollars to go to his religious organization, I say he gets what he deserves.
That presumes that there are "legitimate religions." Who decide the legitimate vs the illegitimate.
I've seen Yoda fight with lightsabers. I've never seen Budda, Christ, Mohammed, YHWH, or Krishna do that. Which is more real?
<COMIC_BOOK_GUY>
Everybody knows that the assasin in "Journey to Babel" was an Orion disguised as an Andorian.
</COMIC_BOOK_GUY>
What do you get for your $20?
You get the right to watch a copy of that movie, in a certain way, on certain devices. You don't own "The Little Mermaid", but rather a mere copy.
You've missed a very important point, if you purchase a DVD you've also purchased the rights of fair use of that copy. These are the same rights you get when you buy a book. Fair use includes:
- The right to protect your purchase by making a functional backup copy.
- The right to lend the media to another party without compensation so that they may view the contents.
- The limited right to exhibit the contents without compensation. (You can invite friends over to view the contents.)
- The right to space shift. (i.e. the right to use the media in any device anywhere.)
- The right to time shift. (i.e. the right to use the media at any time.)
- The right of resale.
- The right to destroy the content.
- Upon expiration of the copyright, the right to do anything you want to it, including selling copies.
The content providers (read MPAA, RIAA and other abusive corporate monopolies) have attempted to use technology, the courts, and the congress to limit these rights. The above rights are limited by:- Technological and legal impediments to fair use. (Copy protection, DMCA, etc.)
- Making media that are specific to a single device or class of devices. (Region coding, DRM, Pd)
- Making media that are time limited. (DivX, Pd, DRM)
- Pressuring legislators to extend copyrights far beyond the limited times intended in the constitution.
The idea that copyrighted works are "licensed" is a relatively new invention. The "content providers" have been fairly sucessful in convincing the world that this is true. They've also been sucessful in convincing the congress and the courts that the constitutional reason for copyright is guaranteed profit, rather than advancement of the arts and sciences.My wife and I got plain gold bands and hopped a plane to Reno for our wedding. She'd have killed me if I got her a diamond.
The ring isn't important, nor is an expensive wedding. It's the marriage thats important. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.
I have some knowledge of this subject. You've severely overestimated the amount of energy you need to receive in order to transmit a bit. If you encode the info by time between bits, you really only need to receive on average 20 photons or so over the course of a nanosecond to ensure good probability of detecting a bit with a triple coincidence detector like this one. Time between bits could be microseconds or hours, depending on the rate you really want. Twenty photons at 500 nm wavelength turns out to be 8E-18 Joules.
You've also messed up on your laser divergence calculation. A 1 mm diameter beam at 500 nm wavelenth has a diffraction limited divergence of 5E-4 (1.7 arcminute). You'd really want to use a telescope to transmit a large diameter collimated beam. With adaptive optics, the 10-meter Keck telescope could transmit a 40 milliarcsecond beam (divergence 2E-7). The diameter of the beam at 2 light-years would be 3.7 million km. Flux density per Joule of tranmitted power would be 9.4E-20 Joule/m^2. Keck has an area of 75 m^2, so it would receive 7E-18 Joules for each Joule transmitted. Therefore, the energy required per pulse is of order 1 Joule in order to transmit a pulse 2 light years. A small Nd:YAG pulse laser is 10 Joules and would be detectable 6 ly away. The largest ever built is 100 kJoules and could be detected 600 ly away.
You are correct that there aren't any mirrors a light year away, let alone and a couple million kilometers in diameter. You are incorrect in stating that it would be energy prohibitive to send data via laser to interstellar distances with current technology.
An array of 17" dishes might do the job with the right feeds. You could phase match with coaxial cable. You'd need a different set of delays for each satellite you want to receive. You would need two or three arrays to cover the full sky. If you wanted a single fully steerable array that could choose anything on the sky, you're talking lots of electronics both for moving the dishes and forming the beams.
You could also do the job with a large number of dipole antennas, each with a bandpass filtered amplifier.... no need for multiple arrays, then, but more expensive on the electronics side.
Of course, any of these options is far more expensive than buying a new house in a place where you can put up a dish. :)
So it runs out next year? 1986 + 17 = 2003, last I looked.
Don't worry, congress will have extended patents to 117 year duration by this time next year.
All statements of the kind in the posted article need to be taken with several grain of salt. Drake, and the recent Lineweaver (Nature) article, are significantly biased toward the optimistic viewpoint. "Rare Earth" is biased toward the pessimistic.
There is a middle ground. Despite working in the field, and having beliefs that life may be common, I would not expound those belief as a scientific truth. Both the optimists and the pessimists are baised by the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle states: the environment/universe appears biased toward the production of intelligent life because if it were not, intelligent life would not have arisen.
The "Rare Earth" types are biased toward the pessimitic because they see many coincidences in the way inteligent life arose here (i.e. the anthropic principle). They don't or won't recognize that they are biased by the unscientific belief that those are the only circumstances under which life can arise.
The "life is everywhere" crowd usually points to the rapid appearance of life on earth as evidence that life should be common in the universe. Of course it is possible that rapid appearance of life is a prerequisite to the appearance of life. It could be that atmospheric or oceanic changes could have made late appearance of life impossible. What some call the "reasonable assumption" that the probability of life arising on a planet is constant with time is both an unreasonable assumption and not a scientific basis for much of anything.
The real science is in the middle ground. Observe, don't assume. We should experiment, not pontificate.
Let's see... The company that verified the names of felons in the previous election charged $7000. Then the contract was given to the 'not so low' bidder for several million dollars. And they 'forgot' to do it. That doesn't seem suspicious at all.
Let's see what the international press (at least some of which still does investigative journalism) has to say on the subject.
BBC: [Regarding lists of preported felons that were prevented from voting] This is Database Technologies. This is the company that the state of Florida hired to remove the names of people who committed serious crimes from the voter lists. I have obtained a document marked "confidential and trade secret". It says the company was paid millions of dollars to make telephone calls to verify they got the right names - but they didn't. There is nothing in the state of Florida files that says they made these telephone calls. So the question remains, why did the Republican leaders of this state pay millions for a list that stopped thousands of innocent Democrats from voting?
More details here
They were talking about Woodward and Bernstein the reporters, not Woodward, Oaklahoma and Leonard Bernstein.
The basic problem with american journalism is that no newsroom in the country funds investigative reporting. The typical daily assignment for a reporter is to digest a half dozen AP wire reports and half a dozen corporate press releases into a half dozen articles. Anything that takes more than a couple hours to investigate is off the table. Following leads is reduced to "calling the corporate/campaign press agent." If a story is denied by a press agent, it is usually dropped.
Editor: Let's see... We've got a President who's campaign was mainly directed by his former president father. This father likely had involvement in illegal covert activities in previous administrations, but the President is witholding any documents from those administrations. The President was elected by the miscount of votes in a state that is governed by his brother. This brother was directly involved in choosing which votes would be rejected and which would be counted. The election was finally decided by the Supreme Court. The bulk of the members of that court were installed by the previous administrations in which the President's father served. The bulk of the senior presonnel in the current administration worked in the previous administration. Lot's of dots to connect there, but it would certainly take more than an hour and a few hundred dollars to get to the bottom of it, so let's ignore it. Besides, it would annoy the conservative owners of this paper. Here, there's a new press release from Microsoft. Copy it verbatim.
Reporter: Sure thing, Boss!
While geek favourites are almost guaranteed to make the transition, movies like "Heathers" and "The Breakfast Club" probably never will.
Damn, if "Heathers" is a chick flick, I must be a chick. I bought it on DVD this weekend ($9.99 at Target). I always thought of "Heathers" as "geek fantasy" rather than chick flick.
They merely need to use their P2P client of choice to download a cracked image of the CDs.
99% of the people who want copies of software want backup copies of software they already own. Copy protection, aside from being rather pointless, attempts to restrict fair-use while not really hampering piracy.
6. But every work of genius always seems crazy when it first appears!
They laughed at Einstein!
They laughed at Tesla!
They laughed at Ernest P. Whorl!
The pirating of trade goods lends fuel to the Trade Federation's effort to crack down of smuggling. While the Trade Federation steps up its blockade of Naboo, their lobbyists are pushing for laws that would reqiuire spacecraft and surface transports be modified such that all occupants are chained to a bulkhead to deter cargo theft.
On the contrary Microsoft doesn't have to conduct business anywhere. Microsoft, which has been found guilty of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act, is currently being allowed to conduct business in spite of that fact. It is perfectly within the power of this judge to shut MS down and recommend Gates and Balmer be tried for their parts in this crime.
Unfortunately that would require an independent judiciary...
Yeah, and not to mention the mag says they make 1 billion a month on intertest from the pile they have.
That would be 34% annual interest. Where can I find a bank like that?
The method and definition was not the problem. Many of the implementations had problems. Netscape 3 and 4 returned different values. Internet Explorer returned another. In 2000, you could expect getYear() to return 0, 100, or 2000.
Here's how my web site has been altered to handle the complaints from those using noncompliant browsers:
The Pentium FP bug was a hardware bug.
This depends upon where you think the bug was. The real bug was a problem with a loop in the code that described the division algorithm. When this code was compiled it generated an incorrect design that was used to create the hardware. In other words, it was a hardware bug caused by a software bug.
That makes it a software bug in my book.
There's a problem with your hypothetical situation. The problem is that scientists never seem to witness strange flying objects defying the laws of physics. And those that do usually try to understand what they are seeing rather than pigeonholing it into to "aliens" category.
I'm an astronomer. I spend quite a bit of time looking at the sky, probably more than any non-astronomer here. I haven't seen any unexplainable lights in the sky. I've seen things I couldn't explain at the time (when I was a child). For example, in third grade I saw a silvery point above the western horizon one afternoon. I pointed it out to a teacher who pronounced it a weather balloon. All the kids called it a UFO. Of course, I know now that I was looking at either Venus or Jupiter, both of which are easily visible in the daytime if you know where to look.
I pull this joke quite often when I'm in a crowd. I'll find Venus or Jupiter and start pointing at it. Most people will describe it as moving in a way that describes the laws of physics. What's really happening is that without nearby references it appears to move. It's hard to find, so if you look away and back, it may have seemed to disappear. The problem is that untrained people are very poor observers, especially if they don't understand what they are seeing and how their perceptions color their understanding.
Even professionals like pilots are susceptible to misidentifying objects in the sky. Reports of pilots taking evasive action to avoid hitting Venus are common.
Until there is something beyond eyewitness report and doctored photos, there's very little to investigate.