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Originally Posted by ratbastid
Also, note PLEASE that this is one fairly specialized use of cookies. They're vastly more commonly used for mundane things like web traffic statistics tracking and user session management.
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Indeed. For instance, if you go to a website and click on a setting (say, on cnn.com, select "International edition" instead of "US edition" so that you always get the international news on the front page when you access that site), that setting is saved in the cookie. That's because the website does not know who you are, and therefore cannot save that setting in its own database as it has nothing to identify you with (except an IP address, but that's not a reliable way, since multiple machines can show the same IP address to the server, and since you're not tied to the same IP address on one machine, especially if you have a laptop and take it around with you).
So the only place it can be stored is in your computer, on a text file managed by your browser. In it there will be a setting, "Edition=International", for instance. So the next time you go to the site, it will ask your browser if there is a cookie for it, and if so, it will read it and apply that user-determined setting.
/used to be an application developer, but I've been a web developer for the last year and a half