B. P. Schulberg

B. P. Schulberg (January 19, 1892 – February 25, 1957) was an American pioneer film producer and movie studio executive.

Biography

Born Percival Schulberg in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he took the name Benjamin from the boy in front of him when registering for school to avoid mockery for his British name.

Schulberg was impressed with Edwin S. Porter's films and managed to get a job with the famous director as a scenario writer. He became a publicity manager at Famous Players-Lasky, but in the power struggle around the formation of United Artists ended up on the losing side and lost his job. The public later learned that it was Schulberg's idea to bring together the "Big-4" before they were ever founded. He was one of the founding members of the Associated Motion Picture Advertisers.

In 1919, at age 27, he founded Preferred Pictures and built it around "American Beauty" actress Katherine MacDonald. In 1923, his old school-mate and associate Jack Bachman convinced him to offer a New York starlet, 18-year-old Clara Bow, a three-month trial contract. Within days of her arrival, she was made part of the studio permanent stock.

BP

BP plc, also referred to by its former name, British Petroleum, is one of the world's seven "supermajor" oil and gas companies. It is a British multinational company, headquartered in London, England, whose performance in 2012 made it the world's sixth-largest oil and gas company, the sixth-largest energy company by market capitalization and the company with the world's fifth-largest revenue (turnover). It is a vertically integrated company operating in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading. It also has renewable energy interests in biofuels and wind power.

As of December 2013, BP has operations in approximately 80 countries, produces around 3.2 million barrels per day (510,000 m³/d) of oil equivalent, has total proved reserves of 17.9 billion barrels (2.85×10⁹ m³) of oil equivalent, and has around 17,800 service stations. Its largest division is BP America in the United States. In Russia BP owns a 19.75% stake in Rosneft, the world's largest publicly traded oil and gas company by hydrocarbon reserves and production. BP has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index; it had a market capitalisation of £85.2 billion as of April 2013, the fourth-largest of any company listed on the exchange. It has secondary listings on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange.

Bù Đốp District

Bù Đốp is a rural district in Bình Phước Province of the south-east region of Vietnam, approximately 90 km north of Ho Chi Minh City, near the border with Cambodia. As of 2003 the district had a population of 51,597. The district covers an area of 378 km². The district capital lies at Tân Tiến.

References

Garanin general-purpose machine guns

The Garanin machine guns (Пулемёт Гаранина) were a series of general-purpose machine gun prototypes developed by Soviet designer Georgy Semenovich Garanin at OKB-575 in Kovrov. These guns were developed in the context of a contest, started in December 1955, for replacing the company-level RP-46 light machine gun and the battalion-level "heavy" (in the old sense of the term) machine gun SGM with a single new machine gun that could fulfill both roles using different mounts.

Garanin's first prototype for this competition operated on the principle of lever-delayed blowback. This prototype was rejected in 1957 for failing to meet several of the technical requirements for accuracy and reliability. A later prototype of Garanin relied on gas operation; this one was rejected in 1960, because it was considered inferior to the front-runner designs of Nikitin and Kalashnikov. Ultimately, Kalashnikov's PK machine gun won the competition.

Overview (first variant)

The weapon was unusual among contemporary machine guns by its use of a lever-delayed blowback operation. When firing, the pressure pushing the case head rearward initiated an impulse on a cam that sent the bolt carrier rearward. After a certain distance, a link (in this case the firing pin) pulled the bolt head, hence extracting the spent case. Since there was no primary extraction, the chamber was fluted to allow powder gases to flow back, unsticking the case from the wall chamber like on Heckler & Koch type roller-delayed blowback weapons.