What a bum rap for those guys. I used to live in Washington State which has both seismic and volcanic activity it is much easyer to predict the latter as like Oberon said volcanos do tend to give warning signs before an eruption. As for earthquakes its is far more difficult to predict when a "big one" will happen. There have been many predictions as to when the next big quake will happen, sometimes these predictions are correct but more often then not they're wrong. The major trouble with predicting any sort of major earthquakes is that by the time a warning is given the quake would have started or have already ended. While I was living in Washington State I had the experiance to have lived through an earthquake which was the 2001 Nesqually quake (magnitude 6.8) and the quake lasted only 45 seconds and there was no warning. It is a great injustice to throw these seismoligests into prison on the basis that they failed to predict what no human nor machine can.
