Russell asks: "Does anyone feel that as more time goes by and more hard data is gathered about eqs that someday day one might expect to see such a forecast?"

There have been some excellent answers in this thread, but I think that one very notable aspect of this question has been left out. Russell, you may want to Google information about earthquakes, nucleation and chaos/chaotic. As I understand it, the reason that deterministic prediction has been very nearly abandoned by a majority of seismologists is that those seismologists have concluded that "even the earthquake itself doesn't know it's going to happen until it does happen." John Vidale alluded to this. It is important to understand that the chaotic nature of earthquake nucleation means that earthquake prediction is inherently impossible. It is not simply a problem of insufficient data or computational power. It cannot be compared to weather prediction.

As an aside, Glen wrote that he expected that advances in prediction would come from Japan, rather than the U.S., due to Japan's greater number of quakes. Even if it was true that there are more earthquakes in Japan (and I'm not sure there are), earthquake data are shared very efficiently, and it is almost entirely irrelevant where a seismologist does his work. Earthquakes in Japan can be studied by a seismologist in Pasadena every bit as thoroughly as they can be by a Japanese seismologist.

Mike Williams in Arroyo Grande