UPDATE: For those of you who are interested in comparing your hash-fast mining rig to FLOP-fast supercomputers out there, I just recently noticed that Bitcoin Watch reports both the network's hashrate per second and its FLOP rate per second. I don't know how they derived the second figure (see "User:"jimrandomh's comments on the difficulty of comparing hash-type and floating point computations).
Dividing the two, it's implicitly assuming ~12,700 floating point operation equivalents per computed SHA-256 hash. For the 2+ users among us that have a 1.6 GHash/sec rig, that makes it equivalent to a ~20 TFLOP/s supercomputer, comparable to the state of the art in supercomputing circa 2001-2002.
Again, I make no pretense of vouching for the 12,700 FLOP/SHA-256 hash figure.
We've started a habit of creating periodic Bitcoin threads to confine discussion thereof to those threads and prevent excessive proliferation of Bitcoin topics in the discussion section. Here is a link to the last one, which links the other discussions. Lot's to talk about, and another bounce in Bitcoin's value (up to 33 then down to 24), so share your links and thoughts!