The Zhong Fa Electronics Market in Beijing looked like I imagined the DigiKey warehouse to: resistors stall, oscillators stall, FPGA stall, etc.

Photos (note: less crowded because I went on a Sunday morning):

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6vx0hWnq-f-V3Z5M0FR...

A similar project is being done by the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT:

Local Warming: http://senseable.mit.edu/local-warming/

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6i6owLMQk

valid point, I should have said that I'd rather sell CPU cycles to some tech company than sell screen space to advertisers.

Sounds like a successful academic project but not so much for the industry. I'm hard pressed to find a company willing to use plain, publicly-available Javascript to write their number crunching algorithms. That said, I would loved to be proven wrong - good luck to you!

Berkley has a similar project going on where you can download a program that donates your idle CPU to their tasks.

yep, I probably should have named it "less evil."

This isn't "less evil" either, this is taking advantage of the unaware visitor resources without his consent; if I found a site doing this I would think it's downright malware.