Mailer’s remark about mass spectator sports entails events consumed by an audience with an interest in one side of two conflictive forces purposefully poised to face the opposition. We ourselves may witness the spectacle of our own conflicting emotions and opinions. Mailer’s use of the word sport can be plainly stated as bemusement. Consider bread and not just circus, but super-real entertainment. The United States is at war with itself and the world is its arena. There isn’t one major oppositional force to our proto-military occupation of the near/middle East, in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Qatar, Turkey, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan etc., but there is a drive to join the team for or against the occupation of Iraq by murder, the last act of a movement in a limitless war that is in every substantial aspect already in effect. The question is not UN sanctions, but US empire. This is more difficult to react against. No longer is it a question of the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the war against terror, but our survival in a world where we are our only enemy. The United States must have an indefinitely permanent land base in the Islamist/Arab region and a strategic nation bordering China to survive the present oppositional power vacuum. The fascism we confront today is maintained by our opposure to false enemies, such as the Fox newsroom, Bush hawks, sarin, and terrorist spooks. The present state of fascism is the titanium cage of capitalism. If you oppose Operation Enduring Freedom, consider that you’ve already lost rights you’ve thought to hold true, and think of the ones you’ll die for.

When compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.

Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.