[Plugin: WP-PostViews] A post can be viewed many times by the same use?

Yes it is by design because it is meant to be as light as possible.

How about a simple cookie that times out in 15, 30, 60 minutes etc. Most visitors to my site only stick around for 7 minutes. If it can set a cookie per post that prevents their browsing from racking up the pageviews for several minutes it would be much better than counting every single reload.

There is another plugin called post-views which does this perfectly and I’m using it in the short term but my fear is that it stores too much data and will bloat my DB. Your plugin is much more efficient but needs a cookie to make the page counts a little more realistic/honest.