Penta writes:

On 24 Dec 03 10:27:36 -0500, "Ash Wyllie" wrote:

John Schilling opined

Chad Irby writes:

Out of the tens of thousands of cannons sitting on the north side of the
border, anyone want to bet that no more than a couple of hundred
actually get to fire? Especially with a few dozen MLRS launchers and a
couple of hundred attack aircraft cranking out a few million
submunitions across their firing positions... while reducing their
command centers to smoking holes in the ground and jamming
communications.

How do you jam a homing pigeon?

Big magnet.

More to the point, I thought carrier pigeons were extinct?

Passenger pigeons are extinct, but they were never relevant for this
sort of thing. Carrier/Homing pigeons are doing just fine.


I know homing pigeons aren't, but I thought they weren't useful for
communications purposes?

Hey, I;ll have you know you can run the internet by carrier pigeon,
per RFC 1149

http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

Carrier pigeons are and always have been useful for communications
purposes when other channels are not available, and are one of many
legitimate rebuttals to the mindless, "we can shut down all their
electronics, so their armies will just sit around waiting to die"
bit.

High bandwidth and low latency they are not, but adequate for getting
out the "Execute War Plan Blue ASAP" message to people who already have
their part of War Plan Blue in sealed envelopes on-site.


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