I'm working on a project and it involves getting distances between two users (The things we do to get a date nowadays...)

During my search for free geo location data I came across the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). It keeps a list of locations for each country. Not just cities but locations of interest.

What I found interesting was the number of listings for certain countries.

Taking a simple list of what country has the most entries we get :

1) Russia 500K entries
2) Iran 300K entries
3) China 200K entries
4) Afghanistan 200K entries

Further down we have Cuba with 50K, Venezuala with 70K.

It's an interesting perspective of what the military deems the areas we should know the most about.

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm