John,

Without reading the links, do you recognize this person whom I've selected part of his material? Now don't look. Would you agree that there was never enough money for earthquake prediction in California? And would money itself answer the question as to whether this could be accomplished? The author of these words now has the money and the place; yet are there any useful predictions being issued? It's on the other side of the world, so I wouldn't know.... I just knew how to get the money there... the rest evolved.....Petra

At the time of Columbus, most experts asserted that one could not reach India by sailing from Europe to the west and that funds should not be wasted on such a folly. Geller et al. make a similar mistake, but I doubt that human curiosity and ingenuity can be prevented in the long run from exploring fully the extent to which at least some earthquakes are predictable, although it is not easy. Such discoveries will be made in Japan, Europe, or China if the current lack of funding for earthquake prediction research continues in the United States.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/278/5337/487

Without funding no progress

The contributions to the debate about earthquake prediction research in Nature so far, clearly show that we have hardly scratched the surface of the problem of how earthquake ruptures initiate and how to predict them. This arises from the difficulty of the problem and the lack of a vigorous program to study these questions. As Andrew Michael has said, funding for earthquake prediction research is a small fraction of the seismology program, in the U.S., and seismology is poorly funded compared to disciplines like astronomy.

Great efforts over the past 100 years?!

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/earthquake/equake_frameset.html