I recently came across this issue using a utility called "App Tamer" from St. Clair Software (not going to provide a link, look it up, I don't work for the company & this is not a product plug), that revealed itself to me via what I thought was a misconfiguration. I use BOINC, and noticed that my MacBook Pro was high-fan'ing even though I was on battery, thought maybe I'd misconfigured BOINIC. Checking the process table by hand via top & ps from the CLI, no BOINIC, but "WebKit" was consuming 93% of one of my cores! -- After some digging with lsof and the process table? It was a single Flash advert in Safari running a bit of a movie and animation. This is more than horrid - it quite pissed me off considering that at any time, my page can refresh, my battery life decreases, usage goes up and I burn CPU & create BTU so someone can run a power-hungry advert *on my hardware*. -- To me, this borders on theft of my computer resources! So, before this, I have Safari open, and how much longer did I wait for Mathematica to complete a calculation run so Bozo Corporation could show me a product I'll never buy anyway? In years prior (look up "time sharing") - you got charged for usage. -- Maybe we all ought to bill the source advertiser back for CPU time and charge them some kind of bizarre carbon tax for creating heat, just like we get annoyed at the paper waste from advertising.

... Maybe it's just because I'm acutely attuned to the tech industry as I'm a part of it that the FUD in the industry keeps getting worse and worse, and I really despise when the complex concepts behind networking technology are distilled into a false brew of corporate lies for sales. It's more of this mediocrity that keeps sweeping this country dumbing down everything. I also love this use of the word "Digital" that just won't die - I swear I want to start a "Solid State" VoIP provider or something and tell people that our recent upgrade from vacuum tubes makes the network ultra-secure because there's more air blowing bad packets out of the network. I have yet to see a large telecom execute a QoS strategy really well, but I'd like to. ... ComCast just got added to my personal list of "don't do business with them", and I'll insert a shameless plug for SpeakEasy as the best darn ISP I've ever dealt with.