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“Businesses are no less likely to be corrupt than government.” Businesses, at least, are easier to sue, since they can’t weasel out with some form of “sovereign immunity” (despite an early SCOTUS case which said it was citizens who are sovereign, not the states; that really should be hammered on a lot more than it has been).
I’m not sure that follows. If my lawncare company doesn’t do what I want, I stop paying them and hire someone else. If they worked for me (with a government union), I’d never be able to get rid of them. So the key is to not sign any long-term contracts with private industry, monitor what they do, and stand ready to replace them. Free and fair competition is key to capitalism, so it’s important to make sure any contracts are awarded fairly (not because the owner is your nephew, for instance). And any work done is considered a “work for hire” in case IP is generated, and such IP is made available to any citizen (they paid for it, after all).
Perhaps they can but they wouldn’t stoop to using any language that doesn’t let them put instructions on the disk in the spot the disk head will be when it needs to be read… They just do the compile in their head and then write machine code.
“Rumors have it that early modules for English to Russian have mistranslated some idioms with amusing results. Translating the phrase “The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak” to Russian and back to English resulted in: “The vodka was good, but the meat was rotten.” Likewise “out of sight, out of mind” reportedly yielded the phrase “blind and insane.” " — Snopes
The engineer says “5, for sufficiently large samples of 2.”