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So let's recap: World-renown beautiful scenery of all kinds (beaches, mountains, etc), mild weather, great fresh local produce, diverse communities.

Yeah, San Fran is known the world over for it's "diverse" community of liberal hippy activists, who talk a lot about diversity, but are gentrifying the shit out of every community they can get their hands on just as quickly as they can zone a neighborhood out of existence. "We value diversity, just not in our own neighborhoods."

Also:
1) World renowned beautiful scenery? like what? The Golden Gate Bridge, and some dusty hills, and an ocean. Oh wow, that's fucking amazing scenery bro, nobody else has bridges, an ocean, or hills and mountains. Anywhere.

2) Mild weather? If by that you mean 48 degrees in Santa Cruz, 93 degrees in Cupertino, sure, it's super mild.

3) Great fresh local produce? As if no place else has farms? All those flyover states you poo-poo'ed have a whole lot of farms.

4) diverse communities? I think those are where your seasonal farmhands - excuse me "cultural diversity ambassadors" - live.

Spare us the "San Francisco is the best place in the world" marketing bullshit. It's an overpriced, stinking hellhole, and the faster I washed its dust off my feet, the happier I was.

Also: http://www.data.scec.org/recenteqs/Quakes/quakes0.html

They're not all Loma Prieta or Northridge, but they sure as fuck happen more than once every 6 years.

Well, perhaps. Speaking as someone who lives in California, where multiple quakes occur on a daily basis, my notion of a "common" earthquake may be quite different from yours. :)

Anyway, the last earthquake of similar magnitude before the Sumatran one was over forty years ago (1964), and our technology was quite a bit more primitive then. This second biggie (and it is a huge quake) gives us an unparalleled opportunity to study the behavior of big ones, as we now have a sample size of two! :)

The US Southern Calfornia Earthquake Center has had several versions in place (also) since the late 1980s. Oil company refineries, L.A. Metro Rail, and gas utility companies are among important customers.

Of course the early version had some snafus in the 1994 Northridge quake. At that time it was pager-based and pager buffer overflowed with lesser aftershocks. They fixed it up in time to successfully warn construction crews repairing freeway overpasses.

Mexico has been working on this equally long. They can experience magnitude eight quakes off its western shores. But by the time these seismic waves reach Mexico City several minutes later, they're peak energy is just that to resonate skyscapers which were built in the old Aztec lake bed. Early years there were a number of false alarms, but some successes too. As with Japan and the US, the current systems are more robust.

Yup!

One of the most famously studied offset stream channels in the world is on the San Andreas: Wallace Creek.

It sounds like tinfoil territory, but human activity actually can trigger earthquakes. Apparently, messing with groundwater is a bad idea..

What can Southern Californians learn from this prediction?
Southern Californians should take the Keilis-Borok predictions as strong reminders that earthquakes have happened and will happen again in the region.

This earthquake yesterday was really no big deal at all, especially since it was located 49km off the coast of San Diego.

However the Northridge Earthquake was one of the costliest disasters in United States history. There were also 51 deaths attributed to that quake too.

Revised predictions have an even greater probability of a large earthquake happening in Southern California soon. 85% chance of a M7.0 or greater happening within the next 30 years.

Interview with a USGS official on "slow" quakes back in 1992. Click here!

That would be the Newport-Inglewood fault. It is not large in terms of length or width (the San Andreas fault is much longer and wider). It also will not displace as far as the SA fault could if it (SA) released in a single event.

This is particularly true in an environment like the central California valley, where two points of land on either side of a fault line can shift as much as a foot in either direction over the course of a year or so, and that's without an earthquake.

This is particularly true in an environment like the central California valley, where two points of land on either side of a fault line can shift as much as a foot in either direction over the course of a year or so, and that's without an earthquake.

I hope you don't mind that I p1r8d your vacation photos, but that cross-eyed thing hurt my brain so I converted it into a red/blue stereogram. Now if I only had a pair of 3d glasses...

[I] dash to the doorframe where your supposed to be in an earthquake

Actually, that is a myth (#5). Hide under a table next time.