Does “time played” include the time when I was browsing in-game menus

You have to own more than half the points for bleeding to occur. There are usually (always?) an odd number of points, so 2/3 or 3/5 is required for bleeding of tickets.

At max "bleed" -- when the enemy owns all capture points -- based on my testing, you lose about 1 ticket every 3 or 4 seconds. It definitely hurts and frequently causes us to lose matches where the ticket count is close. It's also why I get frustrated with teams where they're more interested in fighting than making sure we don't lose all the damn capture points, but I digress..

I can't say exactly how many tickets you bleed when the enemy owns more than half but not quite all the capture points. It's less rapid, but I'll have to do a bit more testing.

From this webpage:

Battlefield 3 does not understand the concept of a full squad. If a squad of four tries to join a server that is near full, but still has enough room it will get split if someone gets inserted before the squad does. So, if you look for a 24-player server that currently has 18-players, a four person squad would fit there. But, if three players join at the same time as when the four person squad does, BF3 doesn't tell the squad of four that the server is full. Instead, BF3 will let three people on the squad of four into the game. The leftover person is kicked back to menus.

Battlefield 3 gives priority to balanced teams over intact squads. If a squad of four tries to join a game that has 12 people, but is uneven (say five vs seven because of people leaving the game), then BF3 will split up the squad of four! It will put three on the team of five and one on the team of seven -- therefore making the teams balanced at eight players each, but leaving the squad broken.