Is there any point to casual mining? Is there any point to casual mining anymore? I recently discovered bitcoin and was wondering if there was any point to running mining software on my laptop while I work on essays or other non-computationally intensive task. I tried looking around, but answers seem conflicted on if casual mining is possible.

I mean will I get any bitcoins from it, not is it profitable per unit cost of electricity. Will I get anything in a reasonable timeframe or is that now a thing of the past? By anything I mean, the silly 0.1BTC I see stuff put up for on http://forbitcoin.com and such, not hundreds of dollars to supplement my income.
TLDR: Rough estimate of electricity cost needed to produce one bitcoin on a laptop with 5 Mhash/s equals to 61 dollar, and would take 339 days with current difficulty.

A standard laptop CPU provides around 2-8 Mhash/sec and consumes 25 to 75 watts, which on average gives us 1 Mhash/sec per 10 watts of power.

An ATI 5870 video card, which has one the best efficiency/cost ratios, mines at about 400 Mhash/sec and consumes about 216 watts. Which gives us about 2 Mhash/sec per 1 watt of power. In other words mining with ATI video card about 20 times more cost effective then mining with CPU.

According to pi.uk.com/bitcoin, mining with ATI video cards at 1000 Mhash/sec will cost 650 watts or 9.75 cents (15 cent per kilowatt hour), and the operation profit margin would be 19.07%. Therefore I doubt it would be cost effective to mine on laptop considering that power consumption changes dramatically from computing intensive task. 

You can get better estimate yourself by using Bitcoin mining profitability calculator and Electricity Prices by State.