I know .nz is new zealand.
.UK is Great Britian
Where can I find a list of all countries…
I am tired of getting spam from .de and .tg
English country names and code elements or English country names and code elements for database import. “de” is Germany (Deutschland) and “tg” is Togo.
You can find them at register.com
I wonder if you’re in another country & you visit the straight dope site, if it has a .us extension?
No, the root domain names are the same all around. Since the Internet was invented in the US we got dibs on all the cool sounding names 
The .us names are generally only used for state government agancies, like www.mta.nyc.ny.us and janus.state.me.us. Federal agencies are .gov.
Reading the list…
Alright, what the hell is up with Niue? The domain name ‘.nu’ appears on half of the really sleazy porn sights out there; I’ve never seen it used by a non-adult sight. And I’m talking about the really disreptuable adult sights, that do things like screw around with your Back button, so once you stumble upon them you can’t leave that easily. As near as I can tell after a quick websearch, Niue is a South Pacific island that’s in a “free association” with New Zealand. How did 2000 people in the middle of the ocean become the porn kings of the internet?
Country domain names are in accordance with the ISO lists linked to by JonF, as you can see here:
Country Domain names
The “.us” domain is not reserved uniquely for government agencies. You can register a business or a personal web site under a “.us” name. The only problem is finding an organization that can register the particular “.us” name you are interested in, e.g. when I wanted to register a local non-profit group to which I belong in Irvine, California, USA, I would need to find an organization that can register “.irvine.ca.us” domain names, and no organization has signed up for that privilege yet. I couldn’t do it myself, because there are certain requirements you need to fill before you can be approved as an “official” registrar for a specific “.us” name.
You can find more information here:
OFFICIAL UNITED STATES DOMAIN REGISTRY (.US)
Diceman - some small countries have decided to use their country domain names as a source of revenue by allowing people outside the country to register names under their domain. Some countries that have done that with success are Tuvalu (.tv) and Togo (.to). Obviously “.tv” would be popular with television networks etc… And “.to” would be popular also since “to” is a common english word.
I don’t know about “.nu”, but it sounds like people are hosting sites over there presumably to evade US or Western European pornography laws. (See also the recent thread in GQ about how the “country” of Sealand is trying to generate income by hosting web sites.)
The biggest adult set-up ( Porncity.net ), along with many other of the BIG western porn set-up’s have bans on various extensions, such as .NU, .CK, .RS, etc, as do many ISP’s.
Here in the UK, or in the US / Canada area’s, casual surfers are unlikely to encounter the worst abused domains.
Unless of course, one looks for them.
the way I understand it, the server does not have to be physically located in the country of the domain, it can be anywhere.
Just for the sake of nitpicking: Togo’s extension is .tg (as JonF pointed out); the .to extension belongs to Tonga. Togo is a West Africa republic, whereas Tonga is a island nation in the South Pacific. Personally, I wouldn’t have known which was which if I hadn’t looked them up on the 'net, but there you have it. And Tonga is indeed one of the worst when it comes to hosting some very weird stuff; if you ever see a link to a site hosted at http://welcome.to or http://come.to , chances are you don’t really want to check it out.
Thank you for the correction Amok. I should have caught that myself. Togo is a fairly large country, and it seems that most of the places that I have seen so far that try to make money off their country domain name are small island countries.
Don’t know about that… the redirection urls can be VERY useful for sites that shift hosts constantly. I always try to find free space providers that put minimal to no ads on your page. Unfortunately, these are the operations that tend to go belly up the quickest. We get about 80 unique hits per day (which is a lot for a local punk rock page), and have had hosts shut down on us a number of times. Having a constant url has saved some major headaches.
Another argument for the vanity urls is the intolerably long or nonsensical addresses that some free hosts assign to you. Which would you rather have: http://bravenet.com/forum/show.asp?usernum=300551183 or http://neussubjex.cjb.net ?
I always had a liking for .nu. In the beginning of its quasi-popular use, it seemed to be a favorite of the “cool” websites to have.
Moldovia also sold the rights to its domain (.md)