How a Bill becomes Law
THE CALIFORNIA STATE LEGISLATIVE PROCESSThis 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
The Y2K issue presents fertile ground for the exploitation of this trend. David Edward Ross (a software engineer for over 35 years)-As long ago as 1969 he was working with software that would correctly handle dates beyond December 31, 1999. A major concern at the state government level is that government agencies will be hit by lawsuits from citizens seeking damages. Additionally, this bill will spawn collateral litigation concerning its scope and application, thereby negating its purpose of limiting litigation. It becomes even more interesting as it is not easy to find the date parameters in the millions of lines of code. 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. Additionally, the bill was sent to the Assembly Rules Committee, whose primary jurisdictions are proposed amendments to the rules, and other matters relating to the business of the Legislature, to determine which policy committees would have hearings to review the bill. The American Electronics Association (AEA)--This area is ripe for litigation at almost every level of the high-tech industry. This was mainly due to unclear wording and unanswered questions. In contrast, AIA argues, AB 1710 seeks a solution by requiring software makers of newly sold products to provide a free upgrade to solve the problem. Further, the problem may be embedded in the firmware of a device or burned into the computer chip itself. "We need this legislation," said Assemblymember Jim Cunneen, "to bring some sanity to our tort system. Intel mentions the notice provisions for repair or replacement, and the free upgrade for the "off the shelf" software versions put on the market after December 31, 1997, as especially noteworthy.
Common topics in this essay:
Dean Morehous,
Governor Governor,
R-Los Olivos,
Information Technology,
Judiciary April,
Association AIA--AB,
Y2K Y2K,
California PIF--This,
Oriented Language,
Attorneys California-This,
ab 1710,
web site,
brooks firestone,
computer failures,
legislative process,
assembly bill,
date parameter,
bill returned,
senator bruce mcpherson,
remediation results,
bruce mcpherson,
press 1997 2,
international thomson computer,
thomson computer press,
computer press 1997,
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