In Washington, DC, we have started seeing "VI" on bumpers...someone said it is in tribute to the local grammatically-challenged village idiot.

Finland used to be SF for Suomi Finland, not Soviet Finland as many thought. =)

Many of us these codes for internet searches. I type in the www, then whatever I happen to be looking for and add the country code. I often locate a particular hotel's own website this way.

"Suomi Finland, not Soviet Finland"

Yes, and Finland could not adapt SU (Suomi) because that was the abbreviation for Sovietunion. Hence, SF. But that caused the above mentioned Soviet Finland mix-up, and because Finland begins with an S only in Finnish and Estonian it was changed to FIN a few years ago.

Well kybourbon,

The country codes on the cars are not always the same as the internet domain extensions. Especially the one letter codes, like B(elgium), E(spagna), I(taly), F(rance), S(weden), become two letter domain codes (respectively .be,.es, .it, .fr, .sw)

The codes used on the internet are normally the ISO codes. The obvious exception is the United Kingdom, for which the ISO code and the code on cars is "GB", but internet addresses do not end in ".gb".
Sweden, incidentally, is SE, not "SW".

Kappa, I don't think you read Geoff's comment correctly. He said "*Currency* codes are three letters: the country code plus an additional letter, eg USD, GBP, DKK, FIM". As you correctly say, most European country codes are one letter, e.g. D = Deutschland, but some are 2 - like GB = Great Britain and DK = Denmark. So British Pounds = GBP and Danish Kroner = DKK. Where the country code is one letter, the currency code is 2 - e.g. France = F so French francs used to be FF.

Although on second thoughts I think I've seen that padded out to FRF too. Anyone, these are currency codes - *not* country codes.

The ISO code for French francs was FRF because the ISO code for France is FR. The old codes, as used on cars, were one, two or three letters (eg, F, DK or IRL). The ISO codes are two letters for every country, and three letters for every currency.