Neat! Distributed computing with JS is an awesome tech trick, some friends and I did something similar back during Node Knockout (MapRejuice: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/maprejuice).
Curious to see what you guys think of the ethical side of it though - do you let this run on mobile, etc? This will almost definitely cause extra battery drain on mobile devices, you think it's fine to have this happen without user consent? ;)
Yeah, you could argue this... and then we could just point out that Jobs & co are right, and Flash has been a battery hog since the dawn of time. This is a reason why the iPhone can be so performant; you're arguing that it's perfectly acceptable to degrade the otherwise shockingly good performance of a mobile device when it can be avoided entirely.
Flash needs to stay out of this argument, as at the end of the day it's still a real ethical question - how much CPU are you realistically allowed to take and continually use from a user visiting your page?
Curious to see what you guys think of the ethical side of it though - do you let this run on mobile, etc? This will almost definitely cause extra battery drain on mobile devices, you think it's fine to have this happen without user consent? ;)