Is anyone using it besides me? I don’t know.

So far I have not heard from any of the people who have visited my Web site. One possible problem is the fact that in order to use the program you need to first download the Perl computer language program compiler and then install it on your system. And though that is quite simple, I myself installed the latest Perl compiler version on Windows XP and Windows 98 systems in just a few minutes several days ago, I suspect that other people might think that it is too much trouble.

It is supposed to be possible to create compiled versions of Perl programs which will run without the Perl compiler. But so far I have not had time to try to learn how to do that.

There is a popular saying here in the U.S. I don’t know who was responsible for it.

“You can lead a horse to water. But you can’t make him drink.”

A translation here might be:

“You can create a powerful computer program which can generate valuable earthquake forecasting data and then make it available to governments and private parties around the world to use for free. But it is difficult to motivate anyone to use it.”

Many governments including the United States government appear to me to be willing to continue to roll the dice with entire cities and with tens of thousands of their citizens’ lives rather than make a concerted effort to learn how to forecast earthquakes even when doing that would be fairly easy and inexpensive.

What government officials and scientists often say, and at least one U.S. government official said this to me is that “You have to prove with "X" number of publications in the open literature that your forecasting technology works before we will take any interest in it.”

The excuse they often use for making such statements is that they can’t afford to spend any time studying technology which has not yet been proven to work and is not yet accepted by the general scientific community.

In my opinion this is like calling the local fire department and telling them that the house across the street is burning. And they respond to your call by telling you that you have to supply them with photos of the house with the flames shooting out of the windows etc. along with sworn statements from at least 3 other neighbors in order to prove that the house is on fire. Then you have to provide them with a list of publications in the open literature which will explain to them how the combustion process works and how they should go about putting out the fire. And then they will need to do an environmental assessment regarding how flooding the area with large amounts of water might affect other houses and the quality of life in the area etc.

They need to have that type of information from you before sending anyone to the fire scene to check things out because they cannot afford to waste their valuable time and taxpayers' money investigating false alarms.

Basically, governments and the international scientific community are in my opinion so disorganized regarding the subject of forecasting earthquakes and many other important subjects that they are incapable of walking through wide open doors or even recognizing the facts that the doors are open and that it is important that they move in at least some direction. Instead they would prefer to just sit there and wait for that world famous researcher named “Someone Else” to do their work for them.

Remember back to the time when reports about the AIDS disease first surfaced. If I remember correctly the official U.S. government position at that time was that it was a disease which was important to only a particular, small segment of the population. And for that reason it was not necessary for the U.S. government to take any aggressive measures to contain it. Well, AIDS is now devastating the populations of entire countries in certain parts of the world. And it is expected to wreck havoc in the future in other countries such as India and China as it spreads. And our government officials’ lack of interest in earthquake forecasting research demonstrates that they didn’t learn anything from that sequence of events. Nor do they even appear to me to care.

Would the general public tolerate fire department personnel who acted like that? Certainly not. So why do people keep electing city, state, and federal officials who constantly talk and act like that regarding things which are literally a matter of life and death? That is a real mystery.