first time and baffled on all the abbreviations

I have been reading posts for the last 2 hours and actually think i have gone over everyone of these questions but once I decided to write things down now i cant find them. So bare with the novice questions.
Everyone is talking about their PR# and i was wondering if that is different for every search engine or just for one? Also how do you find out your PR#? And for that matter page rank what is really the difference between PR2 or PR3? How about how high do the PR#'s go?


Thanks for the help
Your going to see me a lot more, I have soooo many questions Ill do my best to find answers in previous posts.

PR is a proprietary ranking algorithm developed by Google. PR ranges from 0 to 10, where 10 is the best/holds the most weight. For example adobe.com, macromedia.com, and a few others have PR10. PR is mainly determined by a logarithmic weighting of the number of backlinks to a given site.
The main difference is just the weighting. A general rule of thumb for google is that for a given search term, the website with the higher page rank will be placed above other websites will lower page ranks.
PR only applies to google. Alexa also has their own rnaking system.
You can see the PR of any site by using the google toolbar: http://toolbar.google.com for IE. Or if you use firefox, try http://quirk.co.za/searchstatus/. It is a pretty helpful tool to quickly check alexa and google rankings as well as backlinks for any web page.

Good luck