Diskeeper Accused of Scientology Indoctrination 779
touretzky writes "Two ex-employees have sued Diskeeper Corporation in Los Angeles Superior Court after being fired, alleging that the company makes Scientology training a mandatory condition of employment (complaint, PDF). Diskeeper founder and CEO Craig Jensen is a high-level, publicly avowed Scientologist who has given millions to his Church. Diskeeper's surprising response to the lawsuit (PDF) appears to be that religious instruction in a place of employment is protected by the First Amendment." The blogger at RealityBasedCommunity.net believes that the legal mechanism that Diskeeper is using to advance this argument ("motion to strike") is inappropriate and will be disallowed, but that the company will eventually be permitted to present its novel legal theory.
Religion: the ultimate free pass (Score:0, Informative)
Want to get away with torture [telegraph.co.uk]? How about murder [whyaretheydead.net]? Just claim you're doing it for the Invisible Sky Guy, or to get rid of those pesky body thetans.
Want justice? Work for peace. Want peace? Kill your God.
It doesn't work like that. (Score:5, Informative)
They can fire you, at will, for any LEGAL reason.
Discrimination based upon religious preference is NOT a legal reason.
Re:California is a at will state (Score:5, Informative)
At will does not mean "anything they do is legal, you can just leave." It merely means that there is no implied contract about severance or notice.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
No, they're in violation of the law (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the EEOC's official position-
http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/religion.html#_Toc203359505 [eeoc.gov]
That's less than 2 minutes googling. But somehow I still think hundreds of thousands of dollars will be spent figuring that out...
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Informative)
If this bothers you.... (Score:5, Informative)
.... Wikipedia has a list of software that defragments disks. [wikipedia.org] Take out Diskeeper and you have a bunch of options. Nothing changes behaviour like the loss of sales.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
It's a fork of Diskeeper.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Informative)
The question is, who coded Microsoft Windows defrag framework? The one all forced to use?
Until Vista, Diskeeper programmed it. Fun, eh? Pressure from the German government and others is likely what caused Microsoft to to switch an in-house solution.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is true.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Otherwise I can recommend this one. [kessels.com]
Note that JkDefrag uses the Windows defrag API, so it should be as safe to use as the original defrag. Also, Windows occasionally runs a boot optimizing defrag while your screen saver is on, which tends to mess up JkDefrag's logic. You might want to disable it, if you intend to run JkDefrag.
Re:It doesn't work like that. (Score:2, Informative)
The first amendment isn't a restriction on individuals or companies; it's a restriction (at least in theory) on the government. The Civil Right Act of 1964 prevents employers from discriminating based in religion (amongst other things), which is based on the regulation of interstate commerce.
Re:Discrminiation. Period. (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I checked PEOPLE, NOT CORPORATIONS enjoyed constitutional protections such as the 1st Amendment.
Hate to burst your bubble, but there have been several court decisions stating the corporations do indeed have freedom of speech protections granted by the first amendment. This is because corporations are considered to be legal "persons". Don't think this will help Diskeeper.
Re:Wow (Score:1, Informative)
Contig [microsoft.com] (part of the Sysinternals suite) will do this on a file-by-file basis. I have this setup nightly to go through my user directory and defrag individual files which tends to speed the system up a fair bit.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
The article you quote contradicts your statement:
"While it is true that ext3 is more resistant to file fragmentation than FAT, and NTFS filesystems, nonetheless ext3 filesystems can and do get fragmented over time.[14] Consequently the successor to the ext3 filesystem, ext4, includes a filesystem defragmentation utility and support for extents (contiguous file regions)."
14: "We found heavily fragmented free areas on an intensively used IMAP server which stores all its emails in individual files - although more than 900 GB of the total disk space of 1.4 TB were still available." http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/Tuning-the-Linux-file-system-Ext3--/features/110398/3 [heise-online.co.uk]
Re:religious discrimination (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.xenu-directory.net/documents/200810-godelman-leshay-v-diskeeper.html [xenu-directory.net]
Link to access official Los Angeles Superior Court Documents [lasuperiorcourt.org]:
http://www.lasuperiorcourt.org/civilCaseSummary/index.asp?CaseType=Civil [lasuperiorcourt.org]
Ex Scientologist Message Board Discussion [exscn.net]:
http://forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?t=9154 [exscn.net]
Operation Clambake Discussion [xenu.net]:
http://ocmb.xenu.net/ocmb/viewtopic.php?t=29787 [xenu.net]
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Informative)
It turns up though. For instance there was the case where one group wanted time to pray during work time, but the profit driven secural community would not allow it.
Damm straight employers pay you to work not pray. If it is on a designated break then that's fine but any other time people should be working.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
That is nonsense. EVT3 is no more immune to fragmentation than any other filesystem. Wow, it has clustered allocations! HFS has had those since 1986. And guess what? It doesn't fix the problem.
Until seek times fall to zero (i.e. SSDs), there will still be a reason to defragment in rare cases. Note that for the most part there hasn't been any reason to defragment any filesystem in years.
Scientology? Ya think? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
You mean no defragging tools to do the necessary defrag.
Sure if you only work with small files HFS takes care of itself. But with the large files some of us work with the filesystem will not defrag them. And you can start to hear the seeking growing over time.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
Even with negligible seek times, defragging can improve the effectiveness of prefetching.
Almost all firings are "I don't like you" (Score:2, Informative)
The official reasons for firings vary, but the unwritten reason is almost always "I don't like you," "I've lost confidence in your ability to do the job," or "You are too big a liability to the company."
You may do your job well and not steal, but if you boss doesn't like you...
Your boss may like you and you may not rob the company blind, but if you constantly miss reasonable deadlines...
Your boss may like you and you may do your work well, but if you were caught at home snorting coke and your employer's name was on the 5 o'clock news...
That probably covers 99% of individual firings and targeted "layoffs." Un-targeted layoffs are another matter.
Re:religious discrimination (Score:2, Informative)
Why We Protest Discussion [whyweprotest.net]
WhyWeProtest.net [whyweprotest.net] is an internet home for Anonymous [wikipedia.org].
first amendment law (Score:5, Informative)
Diskeeper is probably arguing from Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos. A gym open to the public but affiliated with the Church of Latter Day Saints fired a janitor who wasn't a Mormon. The janitor sued, arguing the exemption for religious organizations from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (prohibiting religious discrimination in employment) violated the establishment clause of the 1st amendment. IIRC, the Church argued that this exemption was a permissible accommodation of the Church's free exercise rights under the 1st amendment. The Supreme Court agreed with the Church.
The problem is, Diskeeper isn't a religious organization, so they don't qualify for the statutory exemption in Title VII. While religious instruction in the workplace may or may not be lawful, making continued employment dependent on religious instruction in a particular faith almost certainly is unlawful.
Hopefully Diskeeper goes down at the summary judgment stage, if not on a motion to dismiss.
Re:Diskeeper spam (Score:3, Informative)
On top of being the developers of all but the newest defrag that comes with Windows, the Diskeeper branded version of Diskeeper light came pre-installed on my Thinkpad T60.
Re:My experience at Diskeeper job interview (Score:4, Informative)
I had a similar experience recently. I had no idea about the COS connection, until working on the pre-employment "questionnaires." One of them (that I saved) had TWO HUNDRED questions, including:
Do you browse through railway timetables, directories or dictionaries just for pleasure?
Do you intend two or less children in your family even though your health and income will permit more?
I researched and found that the questionnaires were COS personality tests, used by COS to recruit new members, so I stopped doing the questionnaires. They still called me in for an interview, which I decided to attend. The HR person was exceedingly late, so I had to sit in their lobby staring at their shelf of Hubbard management books for a long time. When the HR person was finally ready, her first question was, "how would you define a product?" I gave my answer, she replied with Hubbard's. She mentioned that many employees are COS members, but that it was not a requirement for employment. She went on to share the virtues of the Hubbard management philosophy, employed at Diskeeper, and then dropped a bombshell--- if hired, I would be required to attend 4 hours of management classes per day in addition to my regular shift, five days per week, for the first 3 months of employment! The classes were very valuable, so I would not be paid for attending. Now that I think of it, it could have been 6 hours of class and a 6 hour shift... I definitely remember the total was 12 hours per day, though.
At that point I wanted to leave, but I agreed when asked if I wanted to meet the hiring manager. She asked me to wait... and I did, for quite a while. The HR person eventually returned and said the hiring manager was still not ready, and asked if I could wait more. I politely excused myself and never looked back.
Microsoft bought a limited version of Diskeeper. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What the hell? (Score:5, Informative)
If someone has never done any serious meditiative or spiritual practice before, then the mental states it is possible to induce in oneself will probably come as quite a shock and quite possibly be a very profound moment. But when people aren't aware that such mental states can be achieved through a variety of religious, spiritual or even purely psychological frameworks, then it's all too easy for some unscrupulous organisation to get that person to believe the experiences are tied to that organisation, that they possess some hidden truth.
In short, as well as all the very negative techniques Scientology uses, it mixes in a few that ought to be useful and beneficial to the practitioner and tells them Scientology is the only route to these.
Re:It doesn't work like that. (Score:3, Informative)
By your logic "disbelief in pink unicorns" must be one of the world's most popular religions.
Yawn. (Score:3, Informative)
Funny to see that shit bite them back now.
PS: oh, and that copy of Diskeeper sure helped my 3.5 box a helluva way, at the time. Nefarious loonies they are, but they did cause the state of arts and crafts to advance a bit, for which credit is due to them.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
All you need to demonstrate fragmentation is multiple parallel streaming writes, which you can demonstrate on any UNIX-like system easily enough with two dd(1) commands.
There is a clear tradeoff between fragmentation during writing due to writing out interleaved series of blocks (which incurs a read penalty) and avoiding fragmentation on a sufficiently empty filesystem by doing lots of track-to-track head motion to write contiguous blocks for each file. The latter is an approximation anyway in modern individual drives anyway, and becomes difficult to analyse in multi-drive arrays.
Almost no modern filesystem will opt for a potentially huge write-time seek penalty in order to improve read times. The general consensus is that whatever is doing the streaming writing may be highly time-sensitive (you don't want to drop frames if capturing live video, for example), and is likely to be somewhat time-sensitive (when will this damn copy finish?).
The downside is that the trade-offs in contiguous-block-quantums is not so clear; it probably ought to be timed in milliseconds, but generally is some power of two number of logical 512-octet blocks (it can be tuned in some cases -- tunefs(8) for example, or at file system creation time; some APIs allow for tuning with a per-filedescriptor ioctl(2) call).
Finally, busy filesystems that create and delete lots of files will end up with the free space scattered into lots of individual regions, which will also incur a large write time penalty as the free space fragmentation decreases, which is likely as the disk fills.
Consequently, Apple introduced (boot-volume-only) automatic small-file "sliding". When the system opens a file that is less than about 20MBytes and it has more than 8 fragments, the entire file will be consolidated by the operating system into a single fragment-free file in a way which heuristically decreases the free space fragmentation. (One heuristic involves sliding "hot" files, the most frequently accessed files, to a region near the start of the volume, and sliding cooled-off files out of that region into a best fit, rather than first fit, part of free space; the assumption is that cooled-off files are likely to stay relatively cool so a relatively slow best-fit search can be done with little worry).
Other very un-UNIX-like operating systems have similar approaches to automatic background file and free space defragmentation. Most of the free space defragmentation in practice in such OSes is much more aggressive than what has been done in Mac OS X to date, partly because it is less clear to the Apple developers (and the Darwin open source community) that free space fragmentation has a likely penalty when there is more than 5% of a volume free. Free space defragmentation takes real energy (lots of i/o and lots of compute power, and the maintenance of state to deal with crashes/power failures that occur during the process), and where large files must be "slid" this can interfere with a system that is actually trying to be put to use by a time-sensitive user.
Most other open-source UNIX-like OSes do *no* automatic defragmentation of files or free space at all. Mac OS X doesn't either, on non-boot volumes.
Re:Wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Scalia, Alito and Thomas JJ and Roberts CJ may be very religious people, but they are all practicing Roman Catholics, and thus pretty much by definition are not fundamentalist.
If being highly religious influences their opinions unfairly, that is a serious breach of ethics, and should be grounds for considering impeachment.
Being fundamentalist is not necessary for being unfairly religious. Obvious areas of concern in the case of these Justices might be access to abortion, same sex marriage, stem cell research, and the legality of the death penalty, all of which are opposed by the Roman Catholic Church.
Kennedy J is also Roman Catholic, incidentally.
Souter J is Episcopalian. Episcopalians are not fundamentalist by definition.
Bader-Ginsburg and Breyer JJ are Jewish.
Stevens J only lists himself as "Protestant".
Of all of these the only possible fundamentalist Christian is Justice Stevens.
It is possible that either Justice Bader-Ginsburg or Justice Breyer could be a fundamentalist Jew.
Consequently, any or all of these three Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States could be a religious fundamentalist.
Of course the last three sentences are only logical possibilities based on their self-identifications.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
FAT is particularly prone to fragmentation. Finding any free block in FAT is O(n), since you need to scan the free blocks bitmap. Finding an optimally-sized free space is even more complex, since you have to scan the entire free space bitmap and then compare the sizes. Most other filesystems use some kind of tree for extents of free space, making this much easier to implement, so they are more resistant to fragmentation.
FAT was originally designed for small disks, with 2^12 or fewer 512-byte blocks (i.e. 2MB or smaller filesystems), for MS Basic. Fragmentation was not an issue on these disks, since most Basic programs were either small enough to fit in a small number of blocks, or took up most of the disk and were written contiguously, so it was never a design goal. It's not so much that Ext3 is good, as that FAT is horrendous as anything other than a filesystem for floppy disks (where it is not bad, since it has relatively small space overheads). All filesystems suffer from fragmentation, particularly when they are nearly full, but the data layout of FAT makes it very difficult to implement algorithms that try to avoid fragmentation.
It's also worth noting that FAT predates disk caching, which is one of the big tools used to avoid fragmentation these days. With a decent amount of cache, you can know (vaguely) how big a file is going to be before you write the first byte to disk, which helps when allocating space for it.
On rotational media, there are a few tricks that defragmentation programs do other than defragmentation too, such as moving frequently-accessed files to the faster parts of the disk, and moving files that are accessed together to be contiguous to avoid seek times between them.
Re:When referring to Scientology.... (Score:4, Informative)
You don't know what you're talking about.
Here's a clue: There can be agnostic atheists and gnostic atheits. Just as there can be agnostic theists and gnostic theists. The two concepts:
* believing/disbelieving the existence of God and
* believing that the existance of God can/cannot be known or proven
are orthogonal, even if they are philosophically related.
As an aside, "agnostics" who feel the need to bash atheists are just as tiring as atheists who bash religious people or religious people who bash everybody else. Which isn't all surprising, because the need to put other people down is a character trait and not dependent on any belief system.
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Informative)
That's one thing they already did: Hubbard began publishing his "books", if you can call them that, in the early 1950s (Dianetics was first published in 1950). It wasn't until a few years later, when he was under investigation for making false medical claims, that they (as one ex-$cieno put it) "Dragged a cross in the door, put collars on and renamed the leaders 'Ministers'" and rebranded their brand of snake oil a "religion" as a dodge against medical fraud and tax laws.
Here's a great site [ezlink.com] covering the "evolution" of $cientology from a mere fraud to a bona fide nut cult.
Re:Reason? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:1, Informative)
Hells yeah. I learned that the hard way with my MythTV box. The 1TB drive would occasionally fill up & I'd delete things to free up a couple hundred gigs but I'd notice progressive slowing-down of the machine to the point where videos would stutter during playback w/ an otherwise unloaded machine. I eventually tracked it down to fragmentation. my jaw dropped when I discovered that there's no online or offline defrag for ext3. I made an rsync backup, reformatted the drive as XFS, restored the data and after fixing the drive UUIDs I was fine. Now I run XFS online defrag as a cron job and I DEFINITELY don't use ext3 anymore on any of my machines. I'm skeptical of ext4. I'll take XFS heritage over ext playing catchup.
Fragmentation is real, kids. not just a myth from bygone generations. and it'll come and rip your head off you when you least expect it.
Re:What the hell? (Score:4, Informative)
The employer can place whatever requirements for employment they like.
Sorry, but if the employment requirements break the law, the fact that those requirements are laid out in a contract doesn't matter at all.
In California, which is where Diskeeper is based, state law says the following:
(a) For an employer, because of the race, religious creed, color,
national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability,
medical condition, marital status, sex, age, or sexual orientation of
any person, to refuse to hire or employ the person or to refuse to
select the person for a training program leading to employment, or to
bar or to discharge the person from employment or from a training
program leading to employment, or to discriminate against the person
in compensation or in terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.
Forcing you to go to CoS classes as part of your terms of employment certainly seems at first glance to run afoul of California's FEHA at the very least, if not Federal law as well.
Re:Reason? (Score:3, Informative)
that's not to discount the other open source religions such as buddhism, doaism etc... by definition a religion is open source... by definition a cult is closed source.
Re:My novel legal theory (Score:3, Informative)
Your employer cannot imprison you. No really, they can't. The only power your employer has over you, the ONLY power, is terminating your voluntary association. Yeah, it sucks getting fired. But it sucks breaking up too, but I don't see too many people lobbying to pass laws requiring girlfriends to give thirty days notice before dumping their asses.