BMG Rights Management

BMG is an international group of music companies focused on the management of music publishing, recording rights and music distribution. The company operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the international media conglomerate Bertelsmann, its name being the legacy of the former BMG, which was sold to Sony Music Entertainment in 2008. The company was established in 2008 as a joint venture between Bertelsmann and the global private equity firm KKR. A sequential acquisition programme of music catalogues (e.g. the Hal David, Mute or Sanctuary catalogues), music publishers (e.g. Cherry Lane, Chrysalis or Bug Music) and record labels (e.g. Infectious Records Vagrant Records or Rise Records) coupled with an important number of international signings has made BMG the world's fourth biggest music rights company in terms of revenue.

In March 2013, Bertelsmann took over BMG by acquiring KKR’s shares, making BMG a fully owned subsidiary of the Bertelsmann group and underlining Bertelsmann’s long-term interest in the music business. The company's head office is in Berlin, and it operates regional offices in New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, Hilversum, and Beijing. BMG is the youngest major international company in the music industry.

High Speed

High Speed is a 1986 pinball game designed by Steve Ritchie and released by Williams Electronics. This game was based on Ritchie's real-life police chase inside a 1979 Porsche 928. He was finally caught in Lodi, California on Interstate 5 and accused of speeding at 146 mph.

Production

During its design, High Speed was jokingly called "High Cost" by some rival Williams designers due to its then-high production cost. The advances in the mechanical design that went into High Speed, coupled with the machine's popularity, led to many machines being kept in service much longer than was previously the norm. The play surfaces of the machine were not initially given as much attention, leading to many High Speed machines seeing service to this day in extremely worn condition. Williams rapidly addressed this issue by making mylar playfield covers available and later adding hard clear paint coats to their playfields. Canadian specialist Classic Playfield Reproductions produced an officially licensed High Speed 13-color Reproduction Playfield, which shipped as limited edition in 2014.

BeamNG.drive

BeamNG.drive is a vehicle simulation game which is being developed and published by the startup company BeamNG for Microsoft Windows. BeamNG.drive features unique soft-body physics.

Development

In late May 2012, BeamNG released a video on YouTube titled "Revolutionary soft-body physics in CryEngine3". Originally, BeamNG was to be based on the CryEngine3 rendering engine, but the implementation to the driving game filled it with bugs, leading development to be rolled over to the Torque 3D engine. BeamNG.drive relies heavily on coding in Lua. BeamNG.drive uses packets of local data using the Lua network system while the game is operating in order to complete the complex physics equations during game-play.

BeamNG started its website, beamng.com in August 2012 to begin rolling out news of their development of the simulator. Also with the release of the website came a public forum and a developer's blog. The community has grown exponentially to about 104,000 Members with about 15,000 Active Members since the start of the website (as of July 2015).

Beatboxing

Beatboxing (also beat boxing or b-boxing) is a form of vocal percussion primarily involving the art of mimicking drum beats using one's mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. It may also involve vocal imitation of turntablism, and other musical instruments. Beatboxing today is connected with hip-hop culture, often referred to as "the fifth element" of hip-hop, although it is not limited to hip-hop music. The term "beatboxing" is sometimes used to refer to vocal percussion in general.

History

Prehistory

Techniques similar to beatboxing have been present in many American musical genres since the 19th century, such as early rural music, both black and white, religious songs, blues, ragtime, vaudeville, and hokum. Few examples are the Appalachian technique of eefing and the blues song Bye bye bird written and performed by the harmonica player Alex or Aleck Miller aka Sonny Boy Williamson II.

Additional influences may perhaps include forms of African traditional music, in which performers utilize their bodies (e.g., by clapping or stomping) as percussion instruments and produce sounds with their mouths by breathing loudly in and out, a technique used in beatboxing today.

Battle

Generally, a battle "is a conceptual component in the hierarchy of combat in warfare between two or more armed forces, or combatants. A war sometimes consists of many battles. Battles generally are well defined in duration, area, and force commitment.

Wars and military campaigns are guided by strategy, whereas battles take place on a level of planning and execution known as operational mobility. German strategist Carl von Clausewitz stated that "the employment of battles ... to achieve the object of war" was the essence of strategy.

Etymology

The definition of a battle cannot be arrived at solely through the names of historical battles, many of which are misnomers. The word battle is a loanword in English from the Old French bataille, first attested in 1297, from Late Latin battualia, meaning "exercise of soldiers and gladiators in fighting and fencing", from Late Latin (taken from Germanic) battuere "beat", from which the English word battery is also derived via Middle English batri, and comes from the staged battles in the Colosseum in Rome that may have numbered 10,000 individuals.