How a Bill becomes Law

HOW A BILL BECOMES LAW THE CALIFORNIA STATE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS This paper deals with how bills in the state of California become laws, otherwise known as the Legislative Process. It will trace the process of a bill from the inception of an idea, to the outcome on a particular bill. Since I am majoring in Electronics Technology, Computer Repair here at American River College, I have chosen a bill related to that field. This bill is Assembly Bill 1710, Liability, and computer failures. The failure being referred to deals with “year 2000” date change problem, or Y2K as it has been come to known. The Y2K problem is that of information processing using the incorrect date as a parameter. In order to save on hard disk space and the size (number of bytes or kilobytes) of software, it was decided to only refer to the YEAR part of the date without the '19'. Therefore, the date would read as follows: dd/mm/yy (e.g. 02/12/98). On the turn of the century the date parameter will read as follows: 03/01/00 and the software will misinterpret it as the 3rd of January 1900 and not 2000. This style of programming was adapted and has been used for the past 30 years and up until now. Most financial software purchased by financial institu

" Brooks Firestone is a member of the Banking and Finance Consumer Protection legislative committee and as such is concerned with consumer litigation. Many predict a virtual explosion of such claims as the millenium approaches. Additionally, a recent survey by the National Association of State Information Resource Executives (NASIRE) of California"tms remediation results showed that of 640 critical government systems, only 50 had been converted to be Y2K compliant. 7) that approximately 50 of the companies with this software problem may not become Year 2000 compliant in time and will have all or part of their computer systems shut down (or start producing incorrect data) on or after January 1, 2000. tions was developed using the Cobol (Common Business Oriented Language) with the date parameter used incorrectly or only applicable in the 20th century (using the last two digits of the year). However, the true focus must continue to be on solving the problem of Y2K failures before they occur. The Gartner Group estimate appears to conform with a survey conducted by Arthur Andersen in July of 1997, which predicts, based on an extrapolation of current data, that only 50 of companies will be fully compliant by the year 2000. This allows sufficient time for anyone to review the bill and determine if they support or oppose it. Of that amount, the single largest component will be litigation accounting for an estimated 100 billion of the total. California Assemblymember Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos) introduced legislation to curtail the damages available in lawsuits against businesses. If the bill had passed both committees it was referred to, it would have been read a second and third time on the Assembly floor, discussed by the Members and voted on by a roll call vote. Registered opposers of this bill and their position were as follows (as excerpted from the legislative analysis by Al Hernandez Santana):1. On April 21, the bill failed passage in the committee hearing (Ayes 6, Noes 7). If the Senate amends the bill it must be returned to the Assembly for concurrence on the amendments.