My internet friend Mike asked some questions about cookies and I had to look up for some of the answers. Cookie Central is an excellent information source:
"The Persistent Cookie protocol was first developed by Netscape to maintain state in the stateless environment of HTTP. It has turned out to have many uses, good and bad, and many far from its original intent in the first place."

The browser I use now, Opera, allows considerable choice on acceptance of cookies and downloading of ads. It does not work with Blogger, however.

-- posted by Palema on 10/20/2002