Slippery slope fallacy. No one is saying the religious institutions don't have to provide insurance coverage. They are saying that they should not have to pay for services that violate their religion.

Why should you have the right to force your boss to violate his beliefs? No one is forcing you to work for a religious boss.

Because the average healthcare consumer doesn't really have any choice, putting all the power in the hands of corporations.

The customer is the employer that is paying for the coverage. They have lost choice by this law. Again, I have no problem with the insurance companies being forced to offer a particular coverage. I think that is a great idea. I have a problem with the customer being forced to buy it.

A lot of people neither want nor need public schools, they pay for them anyway.
This is a local issue, not a federal one. Schools are paid for by local and state taxes.

I believe that happened. And now the corporations are bitching.
No, the customers are bitching because they are being forced to pay for services that violate their religion.

It isn't a religious thing explicitly - it's a cynical "conservative" ploy to attack and undermine the ACA by using religion as a means to cut out parts of coverage. Note, of course, that this all simply means that these services are covered and must be paid for if utilized, this attack on the ACA is about pushing to make sure it's not available at all.
Yes, in this particular case, this is a religions thing. And again, I have no problem with the patient paying for contraceptive coverage, if they so choose. I have a problem with both the patient and the employer paying for coverage even if they do not want it.
You are basically saying that the government decides what coverage needs to be provided and not the people.

No, they are forcing the customer to pay for services they don't need. The employee is not the customer. The company paying for the insurance is. If the employee wanted to forgo the insurance plan offered by the employer and pay for their own, contraceptive providing coverage, there is nothing the employer could say about it.

No one is saying that believers are "above the law". What we are saying is that the ACA is not above the law.. The law I'm speaking of is this one:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

By forcing "believers" to provide something they oppose, Congress is "prohibiting the free exercise" of their religion. I don't understand why people find this confusing. The same law that allows "believers" to practice their religion is the same law that prevents government from forcing you to be a believer. If you start making exceptions to that law, you are paving the way for other laws (rights) to be violated in the same way in the future.

So health insurance should not cover pre-natal care for pregnant women? Colonoscopies for middle-aged men?

Of course health insurance should cover prenatal care for pregnant women. That's not the argument. That's called a "straw man".

Should it cover prenatal care for pregnant men? It does and that's why it's stupid.

In other words, there are no standards and no concept of consumer protection. Corporations are just free to run roughshod over you. This could be your fundie employer or your crass insurance company that has an obvious conflict of interest.

Since when is consumer choice allowing corporations "to run roughshod over you"? So, in order to fix your non-existing problem, you are forcing people to pay for something they neither want nor need. In essence, in order to prevent corporations from running "roughshod over you", you are allowing government to run "roughshod over you". Wouldn't it have made more sense to pass a law that says insurance companies must offer contraceptive coverage to the customers that want it? That way, you protect the consumer while still preserving their freedom of choice.

Rather than considering to a religious thing, think of it from a liberal point of view; you are forcing gay men to pay for contraception and maternity coverage that they obviously don't need.

So typed the guy from a notebook while a camera is pointing at his face.

You can relax. Those Glass people are probably not recording you. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you are not that interesting. Even if it were on, you would more than likely be the part that is fast-fowarded over or simply edited out.

All these people so worried about being recorded in public are already being recorded in public!!! Look around you. Do you see that camera in the corner that is always on and always recording? Other than mobility and the fact that user has to audibly say, "record" on Glass, what's the difference?

Yes, this can be a problem. But I fail to see how this is my problem. While information density of language can vary (I am always astounded how marketing people in my company can talk for 20 minutes to say something I would've said in 30 seconds), there is a limit. If the information I want to convey requires 300 characters, I'll use 300 characters.

I don't view twitter or facebook as specific markets. I view them as a way to reach a general audience (specific markets would be things like the advertisement I placed in a medical journal). And by basically giving up on twitter as I did, I did 'write off that market' (if you view it as such), so I don't see how your decision to insult me with a snarky "get over yourself" was particularly productive.

I think it's a matter of weighing the statement they made vs the action they took. Perhaps it's a cultural difference between us, but as a New Zealander myself, I believe that most other New Zealanders would pay more attention to the fact that they said, "we don't think it's harmful" than the fact that they removed it.

It is fairly clear that they removed it in order to appease the complainers and not out of any perceived harm.

If I thought the risk of false belief was higher (i.e. people paying more attention to the action than the words) then I'd complete agree with you that the action would be too much as it would spread the false belief further, causing additional problems in the future.

This, I agree with. But only because of the limitations and requirements of the society we're in. I think it's sad that people are unable to effectively get their point across because it means that a potential for sharing information (and therefore increasing overall human knowledge) is lost.

I'm taking a more abstract view here and imagining a world that we don't have. If no-one took offence at the style of how something is said and instead concentrated only on what was said, I believe that it would be a better world than the one we do have. More information would be shared, people would be happier, and misunderstandings would be fewer.

I fully agree though that we don't live in such a world, and therefore politeness is definitely important.

I agree. I didn't mean to say the school was doing something 'bad' by taking away the WiFi. The parents are wrong, but they're also heartbroken and it's probably not going to cause any harm to remove the WiFi from these junior classes. I think the school did exactly the right thing - deny that WiFi is harmful (the truth), but take it away anyway in order to appease these people.

While tempting to do so in this kind of situation, I believe his approach was probably more effective. If you go around insulting people, they're less likely to take you seriously or listen to your opinion in the future.

Just think of the flamebait posts here on Slashdot. Occasionally they actually make a reasonable point, but they do it in such a way that most people aren't going to actually take the time to consider the point. It's a sorry state of affairs that 'how' we say something is important rather than only 'what' we say, but it is the case for the vast majority of people and if you intend to interact with other people throughout your life, it's an important skill to learn in order to actually get what you want in life.

You'd think for a press statement designed to appease worried parents, he doesn't need to talk science that is way about most of their heads - just tell them that it's okay.

Thankfully, New Zealand isn't as 'backwater' and 'stupid' as the summary makes out.

From TFA:

And also:

So it really is just a couple of dumb people putting pressure on the school and not indicative of the school's or Ministry of Education's thoughts at all.