It runs like a charm on my server (Dell PowerEdge 860, 2x1TB, SuSE Linux). Client is a Samsung TV and BD player.

Compare this to the following situation: A graphical designer draws a fantastic new GUI for an application (on a piece of paper, even). Then you ask him how many lines or kilobytes of code this will be. And then the designer asks: "Can't I just scan the pictures I've drawn and have a software figure this out?". Sounds riddiculus? Yes, but: This is what you wanted.

To answer the original question: The only realistic estimate is to add all the gates you've got in you computer, and take that as an upper bound. Which is still just an estimate, because implementing an algorithm for real-time in hardware can still increase the gate count by leaps and bounds.

To be able to answer such a question you have to re-implement the algorithm in a Hardware Abstraction Language (HAL) like Verilog or VHDL.

I did this in one of our current systems, where I had to process a stream of data.
First I designed an algorithm in C which took an infile, generated an outfile and measured the "quallity" of the output.
Then I re-implemented the algorithm in VHDL, which looks and "thinks" totally different than the original C source (but still DOES the same).
Only after that one can give a realistic estimate (based on the target system/platform and timing constraints) on gate or cell counts.

There are two fraction over here: Thos who madly wave flags and throw their hats in hte air, claiming that this has been proven against all doubt, and those who are so patho-sceptic that they sound like the established science of the medieval ages who were sure that the earth is flat and the center of the universe.

So what DO we actually have?

- There is a steel cylinder filled with a "secret sauce" inside the reactor. Rossi considers this a trade secret, and that is his very right.
- There is a box that turns mains power into some modulated power which heats and controls the reactor, also a trade secret.

Acting within the limits that an inventor - whatever he claims - has a right to have trade secrets, how could one test and verify or falsify the claim beyond doubt?

What would need to be done to set up a test for this device that either convinces the pro-faction that it is a fraud or the patho-sceptics that it really works?

It boils down to:
- find a team and location acceptable by both parties, preventing cheating with infrared lasers or whatever is claimed. Faraday cage, maybe?
- measure the input power, maybe even limit the power that can be drawn by using a generator or similar, idiotproof means.
- measure the output power, maybe with different methods, maybe with several different infrared imaging and measuring systems in parallel.
- claculating whatever chemical or electrical power could be stored in the trade-secret parts of the setup and take this into account.
- whatever elese can be done to prevent and/or expose potential manipulation.
More Ideas?

Just claiming that "those people survived attending the test -> no fast neutrons -> no fusion -> must be fraud" is a bit short-sighted.

If the sceptics faction is so convinced that this is a fraud, why not offer support for such a neutral test? If there is no surplus energy, you've proven your point. Bang! Nailed another one! If there is surplus energy, well, then try to establish a therory that matches observation.

I am really not sure about Rossi. If this is all a big fraud set up by him, what would he gain? Surely, once exposed as one, the investors would fleece him. So he would only profit from this for a very limited time (as the investors surely want to see results really soon). If it is real, he is cautious to en extend bordering paranoia, while he still wants to brag with his achievments, but so would be most of us in this situation.

While the report might not convince everybody that this is real, it should be convincing enough to warrant further examination, either to prove it beyond doubt, or to expose it as fraud. Just being a big-mouthed sceptic claiming that it does not fit their world view, so it cannot be will not help. Thats just a bit more pathetic than the shouting "Horray! Instant salvation!" from the other side. Over 100 years ago, scientists calculated that the sun, if made from burning coal, would have buned out long ago. Anything else did not fit their world view. We now know better. Always remember that!

Back in university we had one math course in the same building where the non-scientific junk (economists, legal and suchlike) loitered.
One day we found the board filled with a big formula, obviously left over from the economy guys. We spotted some (for us) obvious problems, and our professor did so, too, when he arrived. He decided that we should analyse the formula, and we found that even with using irrationally high precision, the error margin for a computer implementation (and nobody would do thousands of iterarions manually...) of the algorithm exceeded the expected result range many times over.

Our professor later had a talk with the economy professor, who then admitted that he just copied some formulas together without even knowing that precision errors could add up like this...

Economists don't know shit about math. Thats why I check everything a bank offers to me, and I found a lot of errors over the years! And if it is not an error, I can at least see where they try to bullshit me. Just last year a bank offered an investment that in best case would gain 0.6% p/a over 20+ years - if I was lucky. The lady who was trying hard to sell me the contract (and who would have gained a large commission) had to ask someone else to confirm my results.

...if they kept the NSAs snooping boxes out of the link.

Croudsourcing might be a nice idea in general when dealing with vast problems and patterns, but what is the reward?

When I write an article for *pedia, I "scratch an itch" or increase the worlds' knowlege (well, at least the enthropy...). When I do somethink like Seti@Home, its for science.

But why should I waste my time by sifting through financial numbers? To help reducing the risk for the rich to get richer?

Well, you might call it obsolete. But it still(!) runs circles around so-called modern systems when it comes to interface responsiveness, and elegance of OS design.

Whenever I have to struggle with Pain(t)ShopPro or, even worse, GIMP, I wish for DPaint, and MaxxonCAD might not be a contender for AutoCAD, but it was way easier (and more affordable) for casual use.

And the development environment around SAS C with its blazing fast compiler that could produce ass-tight code (Try making a "Hello World!" program in less than one K of executable on a "modern" system) is still on my mind. Especially with its support back then - far superior over what I get today with the different commercial development systems I use.

Yes, it might be obsolete, because it had no memory protection, but a MMU is not the solution for for all the problems out there. No memory protection also made interprocess communication way easier, and if you consider how well Amiga programs interact with each other via a system-wide AREXX scripting engine, the lack of an MMU is neglectable.

At least editor-wise I finally found something at least comparable to the decade-old super-duper-editor CygnusEd: Notepad++. The sad part is that NP++ does not run on Linux...

As most non-native speakers have a better grasp of English than the average American, this benchmark will have its own kind of problems...

One of my first inheritances at work was about 40k lines of code. One big ass file. Assembly, so I had no chance with Doxygen. Lots of macros to build totally different things depending on definitions and phase of the moon. Half of the comments were in french, which is erm, french to me. And each and every bit of RAM in the target was in use. "You only need to add this little feature." And be quick, because the system is already sold. And it is overdue, too, because someone in sales forgot to place a development job for the "small" change.

And now tell me that 40k lines is small and easy...

And if you don't know why, you have missed this: United Breaks Guitars

Here in Germany there is an "allgemeine Schulpflicht", i.e. children have the obligation to attend school and are (generally) not allowed to be schooled at home. This is German law for about a century, and generally accepted.Exceptions, e.g. for travelling folk are very strictly regulated to ensure that the children get a decent education.

The Romeike family simply refused to obey the law and claimed "religious reasons" for doing so. In the US they (fraudulently, IMHO) claimed being prosecuted for "religious reasons", and were granted asylum. But this "prosecution for religious reasons" is totally bogus - they were simply prosecuted for breaking the law, like every common criminal. And claiming this "prosecution for religious reasons" is not only fraudulent, it is generally considered an insult in the German public, because we take religious freedom really seriously - something caused by our history.

Imagine someone would kill other people and claim religious reasons for doing so ("Kali told me to rip his heart out!"), would you agree that convicting this person for murder would be a "prosecution for religious reasons" and grant him asylum? The example might be a bit extreme, but at the end of the day both is breaking the law, and purporting religion for doing so.

And even in the US the cop would only laugh if you claimed "God told me to put the pedal to the medal!" when he pulled you over for speeding. Well, maybe not if it was a Tennessee cop, though...

"Flowers for Algernon" was the first association that popped up from the depths of my mind...

Ok, lets add up:
living room, right hand side: 5m wide, 7 stuffed shelves from floor to ceiling, about 35m
living room, left hand side: An Encyclopedia Britannica, nearly 2m
study, my wifes shelf: 6 IKEA shelves adding up to nearly 5m
study, my own shelf: loosely stacked, not really shelved, but at least 2m
bedroom, on the sideboard, nearly 2m
Total: about 45m, about 150ft for those who are still stuck in the last millennium, and prefer limbs over light speed.

And yes, they are (nearly) all read, even the Britannica.

And then there are the boxes in the attic with the text books we have decided not to unpack after the move.

You want to be elected? Ok, provide a notarized report on your brain status for the public to see!

As a (low-level) student, the working conditions were horrible: We had a small office for five students with a large window facing south onto a large flat roof covered with white, reflecting gravel. And no AC, of course, there was one for the computer rooms, for the profs and assistants and (later) even one for the room for the higler level students). In summer, our room was unbearable hot, even the fairly robust terminals gave up sometimes.

We tried to cool the room down, but they forbade us to do this after "smoke" billowed from under the rooms door into the hallway, causing someone to start a fire alarm. The "smoke" actually was mist from a bowl of water with dry ice leftovers in it...