Adding insult to injury, it looks as though Consumer Reports has retested the iPhone 4 and has come to the conclusion that they simply can not recommend the phone. Ouch.

Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that “mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”
via

Could your friendly neighborhood Blockbuster be a relic of the past? Yes, according to Douglas A. McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St. In fact, Blockbuster is just one of 10 national brands that may disappear as soon as next year:

Blockbuster was the national leader in the video rental business for nearly two decades. Now it is contemplating Chapter 11 to eliminate debt. The company lost $65 million last quarter. Its revenue continues to fall rapidly as firms such as Redbox and NetFlix (Nasdaq: NFLX – News) siphon off its revenue.

Blockbuster has more than 6,000 stores, so it is hard to imagine that the company could disappear. But, there is some precedent, even if it is on a smaller scale. Blockbuster rival Movie Gallery said in February that it would close all of its 2,400 U.S. stores. Blockbuster’s model of renting movies through physical locations has been destroyed by cable and satellite video on demand, DVDs via mail and dispensing machines. Blockbuster may still be around as a company that has movie kiosks and a small mail and Internet-delivered content business. But its brick and-mortar business is dead.

Considering how thrilled I was just to find this story, I can only imagine the delirious, all-consuming excitement felt by Dave Crisp, a British hospital chef, when his metal detector uncovered this pot of 52,000 Roman coins.

Crisp was lolling with his detector in a field in southwestern England when he made the discovery, eventually unearthing some 50,000 silver and bronze coins dating from 253 to 293 AD. Over 700 of them bear the face of Marcus Aurelius Carausius, a Roman general who ruled Britain and was the first to make coins in the region.

Crisp, a self-described “metal detectorist,” explained that he would have to share the coins’ estimated $1 million value with the farmer who owns the land on which they were buried. Still, I imagine that the prospect of a $500,000 payday will be enough to inspire a whole new generation of detectorists.

Luxury car fans, start your engines — BMW’s very first electric vehicle is on its way. The Megacity Vehicle, set to be released in 2013, is made out of lightweight carbon fiber and aluminum and will be built from the ground up using the company’s “LifeDrive structure”, which is reportedly as strong as steel but 50% lighter than standard aluminum. In comparison, many other automakers base electric models on already-available gasoline-powered vehicles.

Discover what crazy things are done at pizza photo shoots, and why Domino’s has made a promise about how they photograph pizza from this day forward.