Digital Technology

A key committee of the Los Angeles City Council moved ahead Tuesday with a plan to place a digital billboard on land owned by a labor union along the 110 Freeway with some of the proceeds going to nearby schools. Councilman Ed Reyes, chairman of the council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee, called for a portion of the new sign's revenue to go to the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, a nearby high school, and possibly other community programs.

The Olympics made a quantum leap in 1960 when CBS crews flew tapes of the Rome Games back to New York to be broadcast. The network coverage included only a few hours from each day's competitions, yet dramatically changed the way Americans interacted with the Olympics. That's pretty much the way things remained, with network executives deciding what viewers would see. But NBC hopes that is about to change.

Digital cinema took a major leap forward as five Hollywood studios pledged their support -- and their cash -- to a $1-billion plan to convert old-fashioned 35-mm film projectors to more modern technology in thousands of theaters throughout North America. A consortium of major theater chains announced the deal Wednesday, signaling an end to the protracted squabbling over who would pay to convert 20,000 screens to digital projection.

Responding to anger over a new digital billboard in his district, Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti called Wednesday for new rules limiting outdoor signs from displaying electronic messages in residential neighborhoods. Garcetti proposed the new rules after the advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor last month switched a billboard in the 1700 block of Silver Lake Boulevard to digital images, infuriating his constituents.

Hawaii will switch to digital TV faster than the rest of the country to make way for an endangered, volcano-dwelling bird. Most of the state will switch to digital TV on Jan. 15, more than a month ahead of the Feb. 17 nationwide mandatory conversion deadline. Federal wildlife officials recommended hastening the transition so that the Hawaiian petrel's nesting season on the slopes of Maui's Haleakala volcano wouldn't be disrupted by the destruction of the old analog transmission towers nearby.

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. was expected to announce today that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.

Researchers gathered recently in a small darkened lab near Santa Barbara, nervously pacing as a digital camera snapped hundreds of images of a shard of pottery resting a few feet below the lens. There was good reason for their anxiety. The terra-cotta fragment is about 3,000 years old and was inscribed with five lines of text that could alter knowledge about the existence of an ancient Judean kingdom.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a three-month moratorium on billboards and super-graphics wrapped around buildings, a pause designed to give the city time to replace its current restrictions on outdoor advertising, which many consider ineffective. The temporary ban comes after years of court challenges and political maneuvering that have undermined existing billboard regulations.

After he's finished his homework and his chores for the day, 8-year-old Skye Vaughn-Perling likes to read Dr. Seuss. He's a particular fan of the hijinks that ensue when the elephant Horton hears strange voices emanating from a dust speck in "Horton Hears a Who." He doesn't read from a dog-eared copy of the children's classic, though. Skye, who lives in Agoura Hills, often reads on his computer, pressing the arrow button when he wants to turn a page.

For more than a decade, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and others in the tech industry have touted a vision of a connected lifestyle, in which digital content can move across devices throughout the home and be taken on the go. It's been a slow march. But as Gates kicked off the International Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday, the industry has come further than ever in delivering on that concept. "Every year represents a lot of progress," he told the Associated Press.