Why the cookie and script?

I was curious about who was reading my webpages, and so I installed a stat counter to figure it out. No personally identifiable information is collected by the stat counter. You may find out the service's details here. If you'd allow cookies and scripts (JavaScript, specifically) for shininghappypeople.net, I'd appreciate it. So far my pages have been read by people in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Canary Islands, China, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Dubai, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malasia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the Virgin Islands, not to mention the USA.

Now that I've added a PHP script to allow comments to my blog, the comment script sets cookies that store your name, web page, and e-mail address (if you've entered them on the comment form) so that the next time you write a comment, you won't have to re-type them. The information is not used for any purpose other than convenience of the commenter.