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From MIT's Technology Review:

https://www.technologyreview.c...

So why aren't we talking about spending a few hundred million into engineering R&D to come up with this potentially real and very inexpensive kind of a solution as quickly as possible? Why are we instead talking about huge bureaucracies and trillions of dollars in carbon taxes for forever? That's because we're allowing politicians etal come up with the solution, instead of engineers and scientists.

Unless the programming is unethical.

https://www.technologyreview.c...

"After years of declines, Germanyâ(TM)s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces much more electricity than it needs. Thatâ(TM)s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal."

The whole nuclear debate shows that the left can be just as "anti-science" as the right. Because of scaremongering, nuclear power plant construction and development has been hamstrung for decades. It produces less radiation than coal and scales a lot better than solar or wind. For all the money and jobs in solar it still produces a small percentage of power, even in places like Germany (less than 8%). Wind and solar combined only produce only 22% of energy in Germany.

If you believe that global warming is about to end the human race, we should be increasing all our options for non-CO2 polluting energy. Especially if you anticipate a huge need in energy as we shift cars from petrol to electric.

Abandoning nuclear is right when we need it the most is just stupid.

Link to article: https://www.technologyreview.c...

I note that all those in favor live where they don't drive much, mostly Europe, where they have no idea the distances typical in the US (think of our states as your countries and you'll be close, at least for your larger countries -- IIRC Germany is roughly equivalent to Texas. Also, our current average price of petrol is around 50 cents per liter.) Probably a third of Los Angeles area workers commute close to a full charge worth every day; does that put it in perspective?

And I got to wondering about cold weather -- the northern tier can have a month of -40 temps -- and found this:

https://www.technologyreview.c...

I suspect that's optimistic. During northern winters, you'd have to heat the batteries 24 hours a day. That's not going to go over well in areas where the cost of electricity has recently skyrocketed (frex, Ontario, where thanks to being "greened", an electric bill that was $100 two years ago is now $700).

As to replacing trucks... long-haul drivers need to do what, a minimum of 500 miles a day? that's two charging periods. You're going to fit this into a 24 hour day... how??

At any rate, TFA comes from Stanford, arguably the farthest-left STEM university in America. Consider that under their desired 'egalitarian' regime, we'd each be rationed the same amount of electricity, and if your profession requires more, tough. Electricity is ill-suited for a black market, which my cynical little voice opines might be the real motivator under such a system.

I'm pretty sure Obama For America employed many, if not all the same tactics in 2008 election...

Why yes, look at MIT's Technology Review, the New York Times, and InfoWorld - again, another glaring example of a profound double-standard. When Team Obama did it, it was "ground-breaking", when Republicans employ similar tools it a nefarious plot to control the world!

Normally I'd agree with you but since you are trying to compare putting Obama in the White House to putting Donald Trump in the White House I'm going to have to disagree here. Obama, whatever you may think of him, at least had a multi digit IQ that allowed him to answer questions from reporters, skin that was too thick for his soul to be injured by Saturday Night Live skits and had a clear idea of which countries he had bombed. Trump on the other hand walks out of press conferences when he gets questions he does not like, launches twitter storms where he lambasts anybody who lampoons him and told a reporter he'd launched a missile strike on Iraq until the reporter corrected him and pointed out the strike was on Syria.... and those are just three sample of the highlights of what those bastards at SCL Group and their friends have saddled us with

Exactly - here are some of the links:

MIT's Technology Review
New York Times
InfoWorld

The Left seems to have forgotten how Obama won the 2008 campaign - look at MIT's Technology Review, the New York Times, and InfoWorld.

I'm pretty sure Obama For America employed many, if not all the same tactics in 2008 election...

Why yes, look at MIT's Technology Review, the New York Times, and InfoWorld - again, another glaring example of a profound double-standard. When Team Obama did it, it was "ground-breaking", when Republicans employ similar tools it a nefarious plot to control the world!

No it's not yet because those things are more technically challenging. In genitals, you have dense arrays of nerves, pretty complex blood vessels, a bunch of "filler" tissue, the urethra, and skin. What is technically possible now is growing one type of cell or tissue, that's routine, with research starting to get into multiple types of cells grown together. Two different types of cells together gets much more complicated, and growing them together in a specific structure, rather than a random blend, at scales big enough to see without a microscope... that's beyond capabilities at the moment.

On top of that, the focus remains on the simpler tissues for economic reasons. If you can grow a liver in a dish (Organovo's main focus) you can make billions testing drugs for safety. One of the most common reasons expensive drug candidates fail is they kill your liver, another common reason is that drug candidates get processed in the liver to become something toxic to somewhere else. Doing this testing in animals is hideously expensive, slow, and often not very good at actually predicting how it will do in humans. Testing in human cells in a dish would be much easier. Drug testing is extremely expensive but also necessary. So it's a huge market. Genital replacement on the other hand is pretty low-demand compared to that. So there's huge economic advantages to focusing on the simpler goal, much less in creating much more complex genitals.

Genital repair should eventually be a goal though if we actually care at all about our soldiers or those other unfortunate individuals you mentioned. It's worth serious consideration, this is no joke, and feel free to smack down anyone in the future who brings it up lightly by pointing out it's an important goal even though "LOL WEINERS." And people are definitely working on it. Just it's not going to happen before we get livers in a dish.

Obviously you don't keep burning coal.

If you have a better way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, please do provide it. the charcoal is because it doesn't release it's CO2 like the wood itself eventually does within a decade or two.

linky just one idea that's a net CO2 in the air reducing process.

Yes really. Every website that has a like button has facebooks tendrils in it. If you don't have an explicit sign-in, a random ID is associated with you and they keep track of your browsing habits (every page you visit that you can like). Once you create an account and sign-in, then that random ID is associated with the real you, and you get some semblance of control.

Of course, you are the product for Facebook, so *control* is a very vague, loosely defined term.

You keep it in a glorified pressure cooker; the higher thermal difference just means more energy can be reclaimed. I couldn't find a link to the research faculty I read about that was taking it to that extreme some years back (maybe it went nowhere), but this company is doing something similar at a much more routine atmospheric pressure approach at 566C, and this one was working towards a solution closer to boiling point with a storage temp of 1200C.

I believe the Google Authenticator was available on a keyfob that displayed 6 digits, but it seems that even that was replaced by the following. https://www.technologyreview.c...

You'd think, for instance, somewhere someone should be experimenting with the minimum requirements for rendering Martian regolith into non-toxic, fertile ground.

You would think that, yeah. Indeed, we probably have some sort of simulated martian regolith that can be used for this sort of research.

Toying around with the power requirements to augment Martian sunlight and temperatures to levels required to support Terran plants or trying to engineer plants that will grow and thrive at Martian insolation levels.

That sounds quite handy.

Or playing around with in situ production of building materials, automated mining and refining equipment, etc.

Yes, it would be handy if you could make bricks, or perhaps concrete.

I'd certainly be up for a really inhumane experiment

When can you be ready to go?

Germany is stopping modernization? Excuse me? Wat? Wat?

You are right that we have a long history of people crying wolf. As part of a course on the policy and ethical implications of AI, I am teaching the history of Luddite reactions from the printing press to the more recent robotic "revolution". Even recently with ATMs, there was a prediction of fewer branches and tellers which did not happen. So we're good right? Well...

Unfortunately, there is one thing that should stand out as being potentially different this time -- in previous instances of the Chicken Little scenarios, it was those who were worried about being displaced that were sounding the alarm, not those creating the technology. This time, it's the other way around. The vast majority of AI researchers, particularly in the private sector, are bullish on the elimination of most blue-collar and service jobs (even management and hedge fund investors are not safe) in the not too distant future. And if you have doubts, we have ample room to believe that the changes are not 50 years away:

• Manufacturing jobs are finally returning to North America...for robots
• Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%
• BBC News: Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
• Attention all humans of Shanghai! Robo chefs will now whip you up a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds flat
• Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence
• Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
• China Has Launched the Robocops You Have Been Waiting For
• Robots are already replacing fast-food workers Trump’s pick for labor chief, the CEO of Hardee's and Carl’s Jr., likes the idea.
• Inside Silicon Valley’s Robot Pizzeria
• Fmr. McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour
• Fast-food CEO says he's investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees

And other things to think about....

• Dallas Police Used Robot With Bomb to Kill Ambush Suspect
• Microsoft Foresees AR Tracking Your Keys, Milk, Entire Life
• White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots
• McKinsey's 2016 Analy

Right. Especially since he was originally an Obama appointee--which you'd expect would have gotten him fired, not promoted.

But how are we going to afford all this if we are going to borrow another $38 billion for a semi useless wall?
link

While he sounds to have a decent plan, actually getting it done is another thing, and just because he wasn't fired, doesn't mean that won't change. Also he is not a fan of net neutrality. link

Maybe we will somehow get broadband, but have to pay $999999 a month if we want the non right wing wacko pack?

Hm... my impression was that the Japanese had only invested a couple-hundred million in this area, primarily in IThEMS. AFAIK no entity on earth has ever put "tens of billions" on this. If you have info indicating otherwise, please cite.

As for the Chinese, it appears I got a few details wrong. They have spent $300M thus far, with plans to maintain this level of funding for the next few decades. You'll find a decent description of their program here. (But one thing I do know, which is not mentioned in the article: the project is led by a guy named Jiang Mianheng, who happens to be the son of Jiang Zemin, the former president. So I would guess their funding is pretty secure.)

Anyway, thanks for prompting me to look into it and get my facts straight.

I'm guessing that the "half" of work they quote are tasks that are basically pattern recognition exercises or are straightforward application of rules. It's work that at some point someone will find it economically feasible to automate (or economically feasible to sell an automation solution).

Even work that isn't "practical" to automate now is being picked at by AI and robotics research wherever it can be. For example, robots that can learn by example and can work in close proximity to people: https://www.technologyreview.c... This would find a nice savings in between 100% trainable human labor (expensive) vs 100% inflexible automated robot process (also expensive).

Another day another story and discussion by climate alarmists. How 'bout this story. Coal fueled power plant captures CO2 and turns it into baking soda. And it does so without government subsidies.

MIT's Technology Review has an interesting article about the safety - or lack thereof - of self-driving cars. I'm rooting for the cars but I don't think they are quite ready yet. https://www.technologyreview.c...

Yet some flicker-rates can cause seizures to epileptics... Working on that premise, I do believe the MIC made a 'sick stick' by flickering lights at a certain frequency causing the viewer to vomit.

https://www.technologyreview.c...

Former climate sceptic Richard Muller [wikipedia.org] got funded by the Koch brothers, and, with his team, did a completely independent reconstruction of the temperature record of the last.

He wasn't a skeptic: that was propaganda and you fell for it.

Global Warming Bombshell (by Richard Muller) sure sounds very sceptical about the Hockey Stick.

"Nuclear power. Nuclear power? Nuclear power!"

But then what about the methane from all those exploding heads? That alone would make California and parts of the East Coast uninhabitable.

Fortunately China exists, and is not only building AP-1000 current best technology reactors, but is doing simultaneous development on several of those advanced designs that we originated back in the American Science Era but never developed.
https://www.technologyreview.c...

Call me when I can buy a lightweight headset that paints the image on my retina with a frikkin laser beam.

They're working on it.

According to Forbes, they're already building the factory lines. Also at Wired, MIT tech review,
Wearable.com, Techcrunch and The Verge.

No, that is due to decades old design mistakes being corrected after 2 of the 3 worst US space tragedies (both due to shuttle design defects). The lack of a replacement is the consequence of a changed objective and the moderate success in intentional development of commercial orbit jockeys like SpaceX for whom NASA acted as angel investor and primary customer.

I've been a big Trump fan ever since he promised to build a wall during the announcement of his candidacy

Just curious - Why would you support spending forty billion dollars to build a wall when net immigration from Mexico is negative?

Seems to me there are way better ways the USA could spend forty billion.

https://www.technologyreview.c...

The MIT Tech Review article stated that they will limit the commands per second to something in line with what a human (professional) player can do.

I am not 100% sure of what Deepmind's game awareness will be, but they do have a simplified graphics output for the AI (mostly just friend-foe, not the fancy artist made pixels).

AT&T Is Selling Law Enforcement Access to Its Customers’ Data : MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.c...

China is capable of funding diversivies projects simultaneously, and that fact has no bearing on the legitimacy of pebble-bed designs. Below multiple fission construction projects of diverse types and groundbreaking fusion research.

"Several other advanced-reactor projects are under way in China, including work on a molten-salt reactor fueled by thorium rather than uranium (a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the technology originated in the 1960s), a traveling-wave reactor (in collaboration with TerraPower, the startup funded by Bill Gates), and a sodium-cooled fast reactor being built by the Chinese Institute for Atomic Energy" https://www.technologyreview.c...

"It's not the only groundbreaking nuclear project on the go in China - the country recently managed to heat hydrogen gas to 49.999 million degrees Celsius, and sustained a cloud of hydrogen plasma for an impressive 102 seconds, which is a huge step towards making nuclear fusion (the reaction that powers our Sun) viable." http://www.sciencealert.com/ch...

The selection of a French design by a French company is not surprising - France is also a leading pioneer in the nuclear industry, and has 58 commercial nuclear power plants compared to China's 33; note these numbers exclude current construction projects and research reactors.

Consider how cheap cellphones are helping pretty much everyone (even the poorest) across the world, with communication, texting services and payment.
Or real-time translation, educational resources, or even sign language.
Not to mention drug design, logistics, financial services, weather forecasts, ... The list goes on.

Regardless of what Captain Kirk might do, it is silly to think that potentially habitable planets are not already microbial hosting life-forms. All the data about early life on Earth indicates we got it almost as soon as the planetary crust cooled enough for life to be possible. It seems more likely that life arrived from elsewhere (panspermia) than thinking it evolved here --not enough time to evolve. Plus, we have data indicating that life may have existed even before the Earth existed. Therefore we should expect every planet that can possibly support life to already have it.

I think we're well past that point.

When it was first announced all the Learned Men immediately sneered at it, cited Conservation of Momentum, and went on their way. And they were right to do so. You see, such things almost invariably fall into one of three categories: amataurs making honest mistakes in experimental sensor calibration, outright cranks or thieving charletans. The first quickly prove themselves wrong, the second are swiftly discredited and the third's foolishly transparent charades to avoid peer review speak for themselves (that cold fusion clown comes to mind.)

But the learned men are still sneering now, well after the EmDrive has outlasted the usual crackpot idea's lifetime.

For starters: someone else came up with the same idea around the same time; the "Cannes drive." His theory for why it worked was different than the Emdrive guy's... and both explanations have been proven to be bunk. It has all the marks of something stumbled across honestly. Furthermore there is at least one plausible and testable hypothesis that could explain it, which also matches seperate observations. Most tellingly it survived its first brush with NASA - a brush that convinced them they'd have to "go dark" to produce a definitive study on it untainted by media WERPDORIVE!!1! bullshit.

I am not a scientist - but I can make reasonable inferences. It is no longer reasonable to pass the Emdrive off as a "calibration error" or even a likely false alarm. The bitch of it is that 90% of the enthused are - to quote someone upthread - "lining up with their Star Trek lunchboxes to book a ticket to Andromeda." But as others have noted, it doesn't have to work as a thruster to be interesting. It doesn't have to do a damn thing. Something strange is going on here, something seemingly inexplicable. The most exciting words in science are not "eureka!" but "huh, that's funny..." And I really wish more scientists would resist their irritation with the Hype Crowd and remember that, even when their natural inclination is to tell them to shut up and pipe down.

His safety claims are made up from wishful and magical thinking, trying to justify the current technology by pretending it is what it is hoped to become.

Musk's somewhat more sophisticated attempt at the same thing has been exposed as bogus, e.g:
https://www.technologyreview.c...

Designing a chip like the EyeQ v3 chip is a very large multi-year project. Tesla has hired a couple of designers, but they can't possibly be designing their own chip to replace the EyeQ. It would be akin to Dell hiring a couple of s/w engineers and saying they are writing a replacement for WIndows. I expect that in reality, Tesla are trying to integrate some of their existing s/w with other chips and new board design. From what I understand, they have disagreed about futures, and on realistic vs unrealistic expectations from existing system. For public info and speculation see: https://www.technologyreview.c...

Do you have an example of such marketing? I've never seen it.

Read *between* the lines like an actual human being. Not like a pedant trying to win an argument on a technicality.

https://www.technologyreview.c...

http://electrek.co/2016/04/20/...

"During a presentation following the release of the system, Musk said that in good road conditions âoepeople may [remove their hands from the steering-wheel], but we donâ(TM)t advise that.â "

In other words, you can do it, but we don't advise it. "wink wink [cough]lawyers made us say this[cough]".

That is generally the message they are broadcasting.

http://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-c...

" Even with this early version, itâ(TM)s almost twice as good as a person."

He doesn't say, it makes a human driver safer by acting as a useful failsafe. He specifically says it drives better than people do.

Read between the lines.

http://wccftech.com/tesla-auto...

" The feature itself has gained a lot of fame in the recent months thanks to its obvious novelty value and the fact that it is the first hands-off, self-driving technology on the market today."

Ah, but some of this is journalism and press coverage not actually marketing from Tesla. Right. So what? You think Tesla isn't loaning the cars and press kits to journalists? You think they aren't leveraging that mis information...

https://www.teslamotors.com/en...

They fucking link to it right from their own site. This link is on that page:

http://www.cnet.com/roadshow/v...

And this is the caption:
"Tesla doesn't have a fully autonomous car yet. But, with the addition of Autopilot mode, cruising down the highway is now a hands-off affair."

You can't credibly claim that Tesla isn't spreading the word that autopilot allows for 'hands off driving'; despite the disclaimers here and there.

Its difficult to explain to a layman because you don't have the background.
Actually I have the background. Hence my complaint :D

Electromagnetism is the theory of photons, microwaves, electric fields, magnetic fields.
In the grand picture of things, yes.

But not in this case, or a wind turbine creating power with a generator based on electrons moved inside of a cable through a static magnetic field would be the same as a microwave creating photons.

Which is clearly not the same thing :D

Reducing everything down to Maxwell does not help if you don't grasp those differences.

So far you made no single argument that made any sense to a Physicist.

My understanding is that the EM drive claims to produce thrust with no exhaust, and / or claims to produce more thrust / power than can be produce by photons. Neither of those is possible because both violate conservation of energy / momentum.
Here it is again.

WHY PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE: Neither of those is possible because both violate conservation of energy / momentum. Why do you jump to this sentence? There is no logical relation between those statements, and none based on laws of physics. You just say that.

First of all, the inventors of the EM drive don't claim that there is no "exhaust". There are plenty of things that happen in the universe that have "no exhaust", conserve the momentum and accelerate something. E.g. a stone dropping to earth in a gravity field.

Instead of throwing random "it violates the law of conservation of momentum" into the room you should e.g. read this: http://emdrive.com/principle.h... and point out the flaw.

The principles "the inventors" think, make the thing working are based on the law of conservation of momentum!

Perhaps they made a mistake? Point it out and you will be famed. But your arguments sound like: at night it is darker than outside. A grammatically completely correct sentence. However I would likely not start my PhD thesis with it.

The claim is that due to particles/waves moving at the speed of light you can not use classical "mechanics" but have to use relativist calculations. Coming from those calculations the "inventors" built the first prototypes. And a few international research labs did the same. All claim to have found "unexplainable" thrust (That includes NASA, btw).

Others think that "very low amounts" of acceleration have some strange side effects (on the other hand, that would be new physics and I don't believe that): https://www.technologyreview.c...

Interesting are e.g. those passages:

"Crucially, McCullochâ(TM)s theory makes two testable predictions. The first is that placing a dielectric inside the cavity should enhance the effectiveness of the thruster.
The second is that changing the dimensions of the cavity can reverse the direction of the thrust. That would happen when the Unruh radiation better matches the size of the narrow end than the large end. Changing the frequency of the photons inside the cavity could achieve a similar effect."

So, bottom line I have no idea if the drive works or not. I simply find the self proclaimed debunkers extremely unscientific because none of them was able to write a bunch of sentences that follow a line of logic, math and laws of physics.

For starters: there is no law of physic that can be simply pulled out of a book that states: "this is impossible". But that exactly is what they do (and you did).

The only ways to debunk this device is to explain why we see thrust (NASA is reporting thrust in a hard vacuum) in those experiments and why e.g. that finish paper is wrong, in other words, where it is wrong..

As a wishful thinker I hope we put one in space and watch what happens :D Probably we can use a 100g nano satellite ...

Lime + carbon dioxide = limestone..

AKA
Ca0 + C02 = CaC03

Crap-load of the stuff lying around already. And, oh golly someone already thought of it.

https://www.technologyreview.c...

I wonder about that, too, because of data pointing to panspermia. If they are evolved enough to survive interstellar travel, then they might also be evolved enough to help stabilize a planetary ecosystem.

I don't know that a lack of elecricity capacity is the biggest bottleneck in EV deployment. Practical EVs use motors with rare-earth permanent magnets and until we have practical and inexpensive replacements for the rare-earth magnets, that's going to be a problem.

Not a terrible idea. MIT has been working on the opposite idea (capturing heat in boxes to heat houses) for a long time:

https://www.technologyreview.c...
http://web.mit.edu/solardecath...

Obviously it hasn't been awesome yet (we're not all using that in our houses yet!)... but many smart people still think this idea has some legs...

Safety is a red herring. I have two objections to GM crops: biodiversity and lock-in (though they don't both apply to the same crops).

The biodiversity issue has nothing to do with GM crops and is a problem with agriculture as a whole, regardless of where the seeds come from.

This means that, if they breed true, then they are going to displace all of the originals and you will end up with a homogeneous group, which is then vulnerable to a single parasite/bacterium.

In case you haven't noticed, this already happens. None of the shit we grow on farmland even exists in the wild. Take bananas for example; notice how they don't have any seeds? How do you suppose they breed? At least with GM technology, if a pathogen spreads that begins to kill off a given crop, we can fix the problem in a much shorter amount of time than is the case with conventional breeding.

The second problem is that many of them don't breed true or, indeed, at all. You must keep buying new seeds from the same company, you can't collect your own seed stock. This means that your food supply becomes entirely dependent on a small number of companies.

Not only have you just contradicted yourself (with regard to your earlier statement about GMO being hardier and replacing their conventional counterparts -- you can't have it both ways here) but this is false. Although Monsanto patented terminator genes, they've never actually sold anything with them. Besides, your argument is horribly out of date:

https://www.technologyreview.c...

Anyways go back to your food religion church to congregate.

Most of those organizations are pro business growth at any cost, that's why they like GMO and fund research to sell it.

Did you happen to notice how prophetic my third sentence was?

The farmers of the world that GMO claims to help are so sick of top down reorganization they will not buy it , its that simple. GMO farming is buying into a system you don't control that will ultimately control you. Notice the careful wording about the situations where pests become resistant, that's because its not magic. If you offer a choice to indiginous farmers (without destroying their land first) they reject it.

Really? Perhaps you could explain this one then:

https://www.technologyreview.c...

https://www.technologyreview.c...

"The car can’t start in Autopilot; it requires a set of circumstances (good data, basically) before you can engage the setting. These include clear lane lines, a relatively constant speed, a sense of the cars around you, and a map of the area you’re traveling through—roughly in that order."

I personally would like to go through the DNA procedure to increase the length of the telomeres like that lady in South America did...

This lady? https://www.technologyreview.c...

It doesn't rain in Dubai. Also these solar plants generally use molten sodium to store the energy, which then use it to create steam to run generators.

The project appears to be PV, not CSP. CSP has seen its share of challenges, and it is more expensive than PV. CSP is pretty much dead in the US;

https://www.technologyreview.c...

Palladium has long been noted to be capable of absorbing large amounts of hydrogen:

https://www.technologyreview.c...

As I understand it, earthquakes are kind of like that. At millions of points along a fault, various rock structures prevent the plates from slipping past one another. Periodically, those break or shift, allowing the plates to continue sliding. An earthquake occurs when the stress becomes sufficient to cause one of those rock structures to break or shift so that the plates can move again. The size of the earthquake is proportional to the amount of pressure that was on that structure prior to when it broke or shifted. So to predict an earthquake accurately, you would need to know the stress on not the fault as a whole, but at least ostensibly on every single rock structure of a given size or larger within the fault system.

And of course some rocks are stronger than others depending on composition, pre-existing cracks, rock orientation (because of the grain).

Having said this someone else did reply linking a couple of interesting articles suggesting more ways of detecting stresses.
linking them again here:
https://www.technologyreview.c...
http://www.seti.org/seti-insti...

Yes you can measure it, indirectly, using ion analysis from p holes. http://www.seti.org/seti-insti...

Or you may watch the ionosphere.
https://www.technologyreview.c...

I have a high altitude system and a low altitude system (10 ground stations) and both give me the Total Electron Content of the ionosphere to support a patent in the tomography of the ionosphere.