How A Bill Becomes Law Essay Research

How A Bill Becomes Law Essay, Research Paper

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 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 is not easy to find the date parameters in the millions of lines of code. According to a March, 1998 survey by Rubin Systems, Inc. of 128 Information Technology (IT) directors and managers in major companies (the majority of which expect to spend more than $100 million on their Y2K projects), about 78% of the 128 companies surveyed reported that their rate of missing milestones in implementing their Y2K remediation plans is increasing and 37% of the companies surveyed have already encountered a Y2K-related systems failure. Gartner Group, Inc. has estimated (with a probability of 0.7) 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. 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.

As a result, any programming that is not corrected properly by the year 2000 will stop functioning. This will have far reaching consequences as vital state and local services are interrupted, and individuals will be hurt either physically or financially. A major concern at the state government level is that government agencies will be hit by lawsuits from citizens seeking damages.

California Assemblymember Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos) introduced legislation to curtail the damages available in lawsuits against businesses. The measure, AB 1710, limits the damages available in Y2K litigation to the costs resulting from bodily injury, if any, and to the amount necessary to repair or replace the failed computer system or program. In other words, the measure would prohibit punitive damage awards or awards based on emotional distress.

This legislation is necessary to focus our efforts on solving the Y2K problem, while preventing trial lawyers from devastating our high-tech industry with frivolous litigation, said Firestone. The new millenium bug should not be a full-employment act for our state s trial lawyers

Indeed, a recent study completed by Capers Jones found that the country faces some $277 billion in overall Y2K costs. Of that amount, the single largest component will be litigation accounting for an estimated $100 billion of the total. The cost of repairing Y2K in California alone may exceed $9.5 billion. Additionally, a recent survey by the National Association of State Information Resource Executives (NASIRE) of California s remediation results showed that of 640 critical government systems, only 50% had been converted to be Y2K compliant.

Senator Bruce McPherson (R-Santa Cruz) and Assemblymember Jim Cunneen (R-San Jose) co-authored the measure with Firestone. (Senator McPherson introduced a similar measure in the Senate, S.B. 2000, Information systems: public entity liability).

We need this legislation, said Assemblymember Jim Cunneen, to bring some sanity to our tort system. By capping damage awards, the incentive will be to settle these cases without going to trial reducing the burden on our already crowded courts. It serves no purpose to put a California company out of business because of a computer glitch that is out of their control, said Senator