I'm kind of in the business facilitating anti-neutrality (I know, I know...), and carriers are worried about their future - e.g. Telcos selling DSL see broadband killing their long-distance calling income, or cable providers see online content killing their cable TV income. They don't want their value reduced to providing a fat pipe for $45/mo, losing all their other business, and they want to know how to extract more money from their customers.
The "message" that they're rubbing their hands with glee to hear is "STOP creating more bandwidth, it's killing you. Create a bandwidth shortage by not upgrading, and we can help you make people pay to get priority for their (now shitty) VOIP, or IPTV stream etc.." Currently, the best-effort network is often good enough, but they need to create a shortage. It's pure manipulation to gouge for money, and as long as all the carriers play ball, it will work, since traffic is growing 50-100% a year. It'll be sold to us as a great improvement/bonus ("We can guarantee your bandwidth for glitch-free VOIP and IPTV, gaming etc, for only an extra $30/mo."). They'd much rather plow money into the infrastructure for this which will make them more money (smarter routers, identity management services) than more bandwidth, which will keep their revenue/customer static. Good for the NSA too, to track everyone more efficiently, so they can be charged.
The only hope is that maverick flat-rate, high quality carriers will provide us connectivity in competition to these bastards.
Incidentally, it's pretty much what Enron did for electricity in California - shut off supply to drive up prices, profit!
They offer a dictionary reader for various systems, including portable devices, and dictionaries including Wikipedia.
Unfortunately their Wikipedia dict is a old (January), but it seems like a good approach for laptops or other small devices. When I get an 8Gb SDHC I'm going to try it on my Nokia N800.
There's a lot more to it than the dynamic range. Sure, at lower bitrates they tend to have a lower low-pass filter, but that's just in there to make the best use of the limited bitrate available.
The quality problem with lower bitrates (=160) mp3, is the texture of the sound from all the higher frequency overtones. e.g. you hear a plucked guitar string, and it has a complex sound with lots of character, but at lower bitrates it sounds closer to a plain tone. To fit in the bitrate the acoustic model has decided the higher overtone frequencies are masked by the main tone, so are the best candidates to be ignored. It's like when cameras put in too much noise reduction and you get a cartoon like effect - the detail is gone but if you look quickly or carelessly you won't notice.
For this reason I think comparing higher bitrates is quite a learned skill - and therefore if you don't learn it, well, perhaps ignorance is bliss.
we only have two choices: believe what the government tells us about 9/11, or don't. Either way, it doesn't change much as it's already happened and there isn't anything to be done about it anymore
I don't know what to believe either, but I think it matters a lot. The things that have been done under the pretext of 9/11 are huge - illegal and disastrous wars, tearing up the constitution, casual drift towards a fascist nightmare. They are either reckless opportunism by a govt that's as criminally incompetent and shortsighted as it appears to be power hungry, or else much more sinister and we're in for trouble which makes today's woes look like a utopia.
That's the reason I care. Frankly, I'm fed up with worrying about it, but I'm not completely convinced either way, so I can't completely stop caring.
Thanks for the link, it's a better page than most I've seen (shame they can't structure the information more). I'll have to digest that and compare it to the claims. I definitely had the impression the molten pools were better witnessed than they imply.
Again, I don't think it's reasonable to present seriously wacky theories as evidence that the official story is the truth - it certainly won't change any minds. The poor quality of some alternative theories is not support for the truth of the official line, just as the nuttiness of Astrology isn't evidence for a Christian god.
If there was no funny business, then it's really bizarre the way evidence was destroyed so rapidly and so totally against precedent. A plane crashes in the ocean and they trawl the seabed to piece it together. Plane crashes into the WTC and they whisk off the rubble to be destroyed, having declared who did it and how a day or two after the event. It shows a striking lack of curiosity. As I understand it (not having read it), there's plenty missing from the NIST report, including an explanation for building 7. It seems there's enough disbelief that a comprehensive, independent, international inquiry is a reasonable desire.
That's sad, other xkcd comics I've seen have been quite good. Talk about strawman arguments - "I'll mention some patently false theories in the same breath as doubt of another theory; that proves it...". Eh? I miss logic there.
Interesting to note that the people who believe the official 9-11 story are conspiracy theorists too. Does anyone believe it happened without a conspiracy? An Act of God perhaps?
The confirmation bias of faulty logic and blindness to evidence is not limited to those who believe unpopular conspiracy theories. It's enormously popular with those supporting the government authorized ones too.
Faith in the official theory is unshaken by apparently incompatible evidence such as the pools of molten steel, even at the bottom of building 7, still much hotter than the fires could ever have been or have ever been claimed to be weeks after the building collapses. The closest thing I've seen to a plausible explanation for that is to suggest that piles of scrap iron with limited ventilation can spontaneously form a molten pool through oxidation. It seems like it would be a chronic problem for junkyards to me. Someone needs to explain it, and why the NIST report didn't explain it, and why the evidence was hurriedly (and without precedent) destroyed, before I can put much faith in the tale we're told. I'd welcome links to plausible explanations.
Certainly will - A batch of 4oz roasts in mine in 6-8 minutes. Perhaps too fast. It gives off a fair amount of smoke, so I have to do it outside. This means that the time varies enormously through the year. In hot summer 6 minutes is a dark roast, in winter it would be 10 or more minutes, but I really can't be bothered then (New England).
I think that it probably roasts too fast - I think the interior of the beans may be a bit underroasted, but I'm not sure.
I don't like the result quite as much as the store-roasted (Wholefoods roasts in store now, so you can buy beans roasted in the last couple of days). The depth of roast is never as uniform as commercial roast either. Then again, I get fair-trade, single grower green beans for about 40% of the cost of the roasted product in WFM.
I don't think there's been a sports car with an unsprung differential since the mid-70s
He's probably writing from the US, where some people actually consider a car like a Ford Mustang to be a sports car. Or do I misunderstand, isn't a straight, unarticulated rear axle what we're referring to as an unsprung differential?.
They even put leaf springs (you know, like on horse-drawn carts) on Corvettes, though I understand that recent models can actually go around corners, even quite respectably, at speed.
(yes, I'm trolling... please take it in good humor)
How about only have part (the light part) of the motor on the suspension and having the other (heavy) part on the chassis?
Great idea - I think you've cracked it! The light part being the drive shaft, and the heavy part being the coils and cores, etc... you'd need a CV joint to handle the suspension movement. None of the drawbacks of an in-wheel motor, with all the benefits, features and complexity of an inboard motor!
The problem is not cellphones - you just have to take control and you can have it both ways.
I tell my family and friends that I turn my phone off or to silent if I don't want to be contacted - it's usually in a conversation about the downsides of 24/7 connectivity in the modern world. Nobody has ever disagreed that it's a completely reasonable approach. Then they just accept that you're not always contactable, just like it used to be - they leave voicemail if it's important, just as they would on your home phone if you didn't have a cellphone.
If you don't answer their cellphone voicemail within a reasonable time, it's no different from not answering emails or home answering machine messages.
How upset are you if try to call someone at home, cellphone, or email, and can't get a response? Not very, I'd suggest. It's not such a big deal. People's enslavement to constant communication is entirely voluntary.
This is ridiculous compared to the effort of just plugging your damn devices in.
Indeed. Why not put effort into standardizing power connectors (magnetic, or did Apple manage to patent that?). I'm all for labor-saving devices, but this is absurd.
A product which started out as a joke, which someone didn't get... Hmmm, wireless phones, wireless networks, how about wireless power! Ha!
The whole point about wireless is mobility - with this you still have to put the device in a particular place.
What age are you? About 15 by the sound of things. Go back to your skateboard, or bong, or whatever it is that "having a life" means to you. Why are you reading this story if you think caring about how the country is run is lame?
...except for not understanding the "delta-sigma pulse density modulation" bit. In my quest for understanding, Wikipedia (which knows all things) tells me that's a technique for analog to digital?
I have one of those Panasonic devices (SA-XR55), and it's very good indeed.
So here's a pointless bit of pedantry: is it technically fair to call the Panasonic devices "amplifiers" (when taking digital input). As I understand it, what they do is take the PCM input, convert it to PWM entirely in the digital domain, and then use a low-pass filter to convert that to the analog speaker output. So, the classic definition of an amplifier - which applies gain from the input to the output - does not apply. There's no element of the device, logical or physical, where a low level analog signal is converted into a higher level copy of the signal... (the bits that input low level digital and output a high level digital signal surely aren't amps - they're switches). It's more of a DAC with direct speaker level outputs.
If you feed these "amps" an analog signal, they run the input through an ADC to make PCM and then through the digital input path, so the whole unit acts as a logical amp.
I got grief for posing this pedantic question elsewhere (mostly along the lines of "of course it's an amplifier - it sits in the spot where a DAC + amplifier would be") - I'm only presenting it as a quirky, pedantic issue of semantics.
Beats me why parent gets modded Funny (rather than insightful or interesting). Probably the nervous laughter from the people who haven't quite shaken feelings of guilt for their unbelief:).
Anyway, furthering the off-topic tangent, this is the reason I can rarely take people seriously when they say their life has more meaning or depth because of their religion. I don't recognize the meaning in spending your life sucking up to an insecure being and playing other arbitrary games to get a high enough score to prevent the "God of love" from damning you to eternal torment for some transgression. Similarly, terminating inquiries into the nature of the universe with "God did it", is not life-enriching to my mind.
And yet I hear all the time how the secular life is empty, sterile, shallow, or otherwise lacking...
Nobody is actually guilt of anything until the courts say so.
DO you think nothing exists unless the courts say so? It's only legal guilt that is decided by the courts. I am guilty of speeding on the way to work today - though I wasn't caught or charged so I will not be found guilty under law. I am also guilty of taking more than my share of a chocolate bar last night - I don't think the courts are interested in that case at all.
People are so used to the legal system and bureaucracy that they lose sight of real meaning. For immigration reasons it was against our interest to register our marriage on the day we had our ceremony - instead, we had a cursory ceremony a few weeks later for legal purposes. Which date were we married on? Some people assert it was the later date, as that was the legal wedding - I say that's nonsense. We were married when we made the vows to each other witnessed by all our closest family and friends. The marriage just wasn't recognized in law, that doesn't mean it didn't exist, it just means we couldn't claim any of the rights, responsibilities or benefits a marriage gave us under law.
Indeed, it's an evil machine, predating the Athlon & Core 2 reduction in power thirst... But then, so are a lot of office machines. There are lots of 3+ GHz Pentium 4s out there. It's up to about 240W if I load up both the CPUs!
I'd be amazed if your machine is down to 20W at idle though - that would be a minor miracle. Do you undervolt? Many motherboards use more than that, before you even consider the PSU's efficiency, which drops quite a bit at low draw.
I did run an NSLU2 for a bit as a web/mail server with a laptop hard drive, and it drew 5W total at the socket:).
Yeah, I wouldn't want to use it as a justification for driving a Hummer. I still feel bad about my car which gets and minimise electricity waste. I'm in the NE US, so I think most of the electricity comes from coal, and means we all have high mercury levels...
Yeah, not everyone can turn theirs off, and I'm not holier than thou about it. I have a machine on 24/7 at home, doing MythTv and VMs for mail/web server, bittorrent server, slimserver... It's more of a 60W machine, but it's the 24/7 usage that really add up.
I have to connect remotely sometimes, and use Wake-On-LAN to get my workstation started. Means I have a minute or so wait for the reboot (for some reason my workstation won't do hibernate or suspend). It also means I have to have access to a running machine on the work subnet to send the WOL packet from, but I do. (a WOL python script is trivial - got it from a search)
The Prius was never for real environmentalists anyway. It's for lazy yuppies who want to put out an environmentally conscious image.
I came to that conclusion when I did a calculation of the energy saved by turning off my computer when I wasn't at work. It's amazing how many people leave them on all night to save minor hassle (I know sometimes there good reasons, but not for most cases where I see it).
I worked out turning my one work computer off as I leave the office keeps about 1 ton of CO2 per year out of the atmosphere (workings below), plus an amount of mercury and other pollution, assuming the electricity here comes from coal. It takes 100 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 ton of CO2. Please correct me if I'm wrong
My machine: a twin Xeon, draws 140W at idle. More efficient machines may draw little more than half of that. Laptops, significantly less again.
If it's off 15 hours at night and all weekend: 123 hours
Coal generation produces about 2.3lb CO2 per KW/h (reference)
therefore 2059 lb is produced by around 106 gallons of gasoline.
That's about how much I'd save if I had a Prius (I do ~8000 miles/year). Sure, many people do more, and have more efficient computers, but it puts it in perspective.
brining a laptop + its accessories means you'll have to sacrifice space that you could use for another couple pairs of underwear or a shirt.
No No No!:) If you didn't need the extra underwear + shirt, you still don't! The laptop is just extra weight, extra hassle, less freedom. Clean your clothes by hand in 5 mins in the evening, and be free.
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I'm kind of in the business facilitating anti-neutrality (I know, I know...), and carriers are worried about their future - e.g. Telcos selling DSL see broadband killing their long-distance calling income, or cable providers see online content killing their cable TV income. They don't want their value reduced to providing a fat pipe for $45/mo, losing all their other business, and they want to know how to extract more money from their customers.
The "message" that they're rubbing their hands with glee to hear is "STOP creating more bandwidth, it's killing you. Create a bandwidth shortage by not upgrading, and we can help you make people pay to get priority for their (now shitty) VOIP, or IPTV stream etc.." Currently, the best-effort network is often good enough, but they need to create a shortage. It's pure manipulation to gouge for money, and as long as all the carriers play ball, it will work, since traffic is growing 50-100% a year. It'll be sold to us as a great improvement/bonus ("We can guarantee your bandwidth for glitch-free VOIP and IPTV, gaming etc, for only an extra $30/mo."). They'd much rather plow money into the infrastructure for this which will make them more money (smarter routers, identity management services) than more bandwidth, which will keep their revenue/customer static. Good for the NSA too, to track everyone more efficiently, so they can be charged.
The only hope is that maverick flat-rate, high quality carriers will provide us connectivity in competition to these bastards.
Incidentally, it's pretty much what Enron did for electricity in California - shut off supply to drive up prices, profit!
Anyone with experience of sdict?
They offer a dictionary reader for various systems, including portable devices, and dictionaries including Wikipedia.
Unfortunately their Wikipedia dict is a old (January), but it seems like a good approach for laptops or other small devices. When I get an 8Gb SDHC I'm going to try it on my Nokia N800.
forgot to preview - was trying to say "lower bitrates (<= 160)"
There's a lot more to it than the dynamic range. Sure, at lower bitrates they tend to have a lower low-pass filter, but that's just in there to make the best use of the limited bitrate available. The quality problem with lower bitrates (=160) mp3, is the texture of the sound from all the higher frequency overtones. e.g. you hear a plucked guitar string, and it has a complex sound with lots of character, but at lower bitrates it sounds closer to a plain tone. To fit in the bitrate the acoustic model has decided the higher overtone frequencies are masked by the main tone, so are the best candidates to be ignored. It's like when cameras put in too much noise reduction and you get a cartoon like effect - the detail is gone but if you look quickly or carelessly you won't notice. For this reason I think comparing higher bitrates is quite a learned skill - and therefore if you don't learn it, well, perhaps ignorance is bliss.
Overthrowing a sovereign nation. Isn't that the phrase? Google gets me, for example: Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
Then there's the question of the deliberate misleading of Congress into authorizing the war.
I don't know what to believe either, but I think it matters a lot. The things that have been done under the pretext of 9/11 are huge - illegal and disastrous wars, tearing up the constitution, casual drift towards a fascist nightmare. They are either reckless opportunism by a govt that's as criminally incompetent and shortsighted as it appears to be power hungry, or else much more sinister and we're in for trouble which makes today's woes look like a utopia.
That's the reason I care. Frankly, I'm fed up with worrying about it, but I'm not completely convinced either way, so I can't completely stop caring.
Thanks for the link, it's a better page than most I've seen (shame they can't structure the information more). I'll have to digest that and compare it to the claims. I definitely had the impression the molten pools were better witnessed than they imply.
Again, I don't think it's reasonable to present seriously wacky theories as evidence that the official story is the truth - it certainly won't change any minds. The poor quality of some alternative theories is not support for the truth of the official line, just as the nuttiness of Astrology isn't evidence for a Christian god.
If there was no funny business, then it's really bizarre the way evidence was destroyed so rapidly and so totally against precedent. A plane crashes in the ocean and they trawl the seabed to piece it together. Plane crashes into the WTC and they whisk off the rubble to be destroyed, having declared who did it and how a day or two after the event. It shows a striking lack of curiosity. As I understand it (not having read it), there's plenty missing from the NIST report, including an explanation for building 7. It seems there's enough disbelief that a comprehensive, independent, international inquiry is a reasonable desire.
That's sad, other xkcd comics I've seen have been quite good. Talk about strawman arguments - "I'll mention some patently false theories in the same breath as doubt of another theory; that proves it...". Eh? I miss logic there.
Interesting to note that the people who believe the official 9-11 story are conspiracy theorists too. Does anyone believe it happened without a conspiracy? An Act of God perhaps?
The confirmation bias of faulty logic and blindness to evidence is not limited to those who believe unpopular conspiracy theories. It's enormously popular with those supporting the government authorized ones too.
Faith in the official theory is unshaken by apparently incompatible evidence such as the pools of molten steel, even at the bottom of building 7, still much hotter than the fires could ever have been or have ever been claimed to be weeks after the building collapses. The closest thing I've seen to a plausible explanation for that is to suggest that piles of scrap iron with limited ventilation can spontaneously form a molten pool through oxidation. It seems like it would be a chronic problem for junkyards to me. Someone needs to explain it, and why the NIST report didn't explain it, and why the evidence was hurriedly (and without precedent) destroyed, before I can put much faith in the tale we're told. I'd welcome links to plausible explanations.
Certainly will - A batch of 4oz roasts in mine in 6-8 minutes. Perhaps too fast. It gives off a fair amount of smoke, so I have to do it outside. This means that the time varies enormously through the year. In hot summer 6 minutes is a dark roast, in winter it would be 10 or more minutes, but I really can't be bothered then (New England).
I think that it probably roasts too fast - I think the interior of the beans may be a bit underroasted, but I'm not sure.
I don't like the result quite as much as the store-roasted (Wholefoods roasts in store now, so you can buy beans roasted in the last couple of days). The depth of roast is never as uniform as commercial roast either. Then again, I get fair-trade, single grower green beans for about 40% of the cost of the roasted product in WFM.
Yeah, and cars would avoid heavy steel wheels for something light made of an alloy, even though it would be much more expensive and less durable.
Hmmm....
He's probably writing from the US, where some people actually consider a car like a Ford Mustang to be a sports car. Or do I misunderstand, isn't a straight, unarticulated rear axle what we're referring to as an unsprung differential?.
They even put leaf springs (you know, like on horse-drawn carts) on Corvettes, though I understand that recent models can actually go around corners, even quite respectably, at speed.
(yes, I'm trolling... please take it in good humor)
Great idea - I think you've cracked it! The light part being the drive shaft, and the heavy part being the coils and cores, etc... you'd need a CV joint to handle the suspension movement. None of the drawbacks of an in-wheel motor, with all the benefits, features and complexity of an inboard motor!
Wait a minute....
I was going to say something like that. About the only reason anybody doesn't google it, is because they googled it in the past and can remember.
The problem is not cellphones - you just have to take control and you can have it both ways.
I tell my family and friends that I turn my phone off or to silent if I don't want to be contacted - it's usually in a conversation about the downsides of 24/7 connectivity in the modern world. Nobody has ever disagreed that it's a completely reasonable approach. Then they just accept that you're not always contactable, just like it used to be - they leave voicemail if it's important, just as they would on your home phone if you didn't have a cellphone.
If you don't answer their cellphone voicemail within a reasonable time, it's no different from not answering emails or home answering machine messages.
How upset are you if try to call someone at home, cellphone, or email, and can't get a response? Not very, I'd suggest. It's not such a big deal. People's enslavement to constant communication is entirely voluntary.
Indeed. Why not put effort into standardizing power connectors (magnetic, or did Apple manage to patent that?). I'm all for labor-saving devices, but this is absurd.
A product which started out as a joke, which someone didn't get... Hmmm, wireless phones, wireless networks, how about wireless power! Ha!
The whole point about wireless is mobility - with this you still have to put the device in a particular place.
What age are you? About 15 by the sound of things. Go back to your skateboard, or bong, or whatever it is that "having a life" means to you. Why are you reading this story if you think caring about how the country is run is lame?
duh, I obviously didn't read Wikipedia very well on the "delta-sigma pulse density modulation".... ahem.
...except for not understanding the "delta-sigma pulse density modulation" bit. In my quest for understanding, Wikipedia (which knows all things) tells me that's a technique for analog to digital?
I have one of those Panasonic devices (SA-XR55), and it's very good indeed.
So here's a pointless bit of pedantry: is it technically fair to call the Panasonic devices "amplifiers" (when taking digital input). As I understand it, what they do is take the PCM input, convert it to PWM entirely in the digital domain, and then use a low-pass filter to convert that to the analog speaker output. So, the classic definition of an amplifier - which applies gain from the input to the output - does not apply. There's no element of the device, logical or physical, where a low level analog signal is converted into a higher level copy of the signal... (the bits that input low level digital and output a high level digital signal surely aren't amps - they're switches). It's more of a DAC with direct speaker level outputs.
If you feed these "amps" an analog signal, they run the input through an ADC to make PCM and then through the digital input path, so the whole unit acts as a logical amp.
I got grief for posing this pedantic question elsewhere (mostly along the lines of "of course it's an amplifier - it sits in the spot where a DAC + amplifier would be") - I'm only presenting it as a quirky, pedantic issue of semantics.
Beats me why parent gets modded Funny (rather than insightful or interesting). Probably the nervous laughter from the people who haven't quite shaken feelings of guilt for their unbelief:).
Anyway, furthering the off-topic tangent, this is the reason I can rarely take people seriously when they say their life has more meaning or depth because of their religion. I don't recognize the meaning in spending your life sucking up to an insecure being and playing other arbitrary games to get a high enough score to prevent the "God of love" from damning you to eternal torment for some transgression. Similarly, terminating inquiries into the nature of the universe with "God did it", is not life-enriching to my mind.
And yet I hear all the time how the secular life is empty, sterile, shallow, or otherwise lacking...
DO you think nothing exists unless the courts say so? It's only legal guilt that is decided by the courts. I am guilty of speeding on the way to work today - though I wasn't caught or charged so I will not be found guilty under law. I am also guilty of taking more than my share of a chocolate bar last night - I don't think the courts are interested in that case at all.
People are so used to the legal system and bureaucracy that they lose sight of real meaning. For immigration reasons it was against our interest to register our marriage on the day we had our ceremony - instead, we had a cursory ceremony a few weeks later for legal purposes. Which date were we married on? Some people assert it was the later date, as that was the legal wedding - I say that's nonsense. We were married when we made the vows to each other witnessed by all our closest family and friends. The marriage just wasn't recognized in law, that doesn't mean it didn't exist, it just means we couldn't claim any of the rights, responsibilities or benefits a marriage gave us under law.
Indeed, it's an evil machine, predating the Athlon & Core 2 reduction in power thirst... But then, so are a lot of office machines. There are lots of 3+ GHz Pentium 4s out there. It's up to about 240W if I load up both the CPUs!
I'd be amazed if your machine is down to 20W at idle though - that would be a minor miracle. Do you undervolt? Many motherboards use more than that, before you even consider the PSU's efficiency, which drops quite a bit at low draw.
I did run an NSLU2 for a bit as a web/mail server with a laptop hard drive, and it drew 5W total at the socket :).
Yeah, I wouldn't want to use it as a justification for driving a Hummer. I still feel bad about my car which gets and minimise electricity waste. I'm in the NE US, so I think most of the electricity comes from coal, and means we all have high mercury levels...
Yeah, not everyone can turn theirs off, and I'm not holier than thou about it. I have a machine on 24/7 at home, doing MythTv and VMs for mail/web server, bittorrent server, slimserver... It's more of a 60W machine, but it's the 24/7 usage that really add up.
I have to connect remotely sometimes, and use Wake-On-LAN to get my workstation started. Means I have a minute or so wait for the reboot (for some reason my workstation won't do hibernate or suspend). It also means I have to have access to a running machine on the work subnet to send the WOL packet from, but I do. (a WOL python script is trivial - got it from a search)
I came to that conclusion when I did a calculation of the energy saved by turning off my computer when I wasn't at work. It's amazing how many people leave them on all night to save minor hassle (I know sometimes there good reasons, but not for most cases where I see it).
I worked out turning my one work computer off as I leave the office keeps about 1 ton of CO2 per year out of the atmosphere (workings below), plus an amount of mercury and other pollution, assuming the electricity here comes from coal. It takes 100 gallons of gasoline to produce 1 ton of CO2. Please correct me if I'm wrong
0.140 * 123 * 52 * 2.3 = 2059lb
therefore 2059 lb is produced by around 106 gallons of gasoline.
That's about how much I'd save if I had a Prius (I do ~8000 miles/year). Sure, many people do more, and have more efficient computers, but it puts it in perspective.
No No No! :) If you didn't need the extra underwear + shirt, you still don't! The laptop is just extra weight, extra hassle, less freedom. Clean your clothes by hand in 5 mins in the evening, and be free.