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 institutions 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). This makes most of the world's financial software inadequate and incorrect for the new millenium.
             How is that? The date parameter is used (in the incorrect format) in various crucial calculations such as calculating interest on bonds and pension funds. Hence, 30 years of programming needs to be corrected in a 6th of the time! This is a global task of greater magnitude than ever imagined. Basically all the programming of the last 30 years needs to be corrected in time for the turn of the century. It becomes even more interesting as it ...