Ugh!! What a horrible example! Is that even a "stupid question"? It felt more like a "lazy, arrogant student hopes someone will do his homework for him" post to me.

You make some great points but I think your example undermines them because while we should be helping people new to Perl the exception to that is we should not be blindly handing almost complete solutions to homework.

Granted, it can be hard to tell the difference at times but in your example the OP offers so little while asking for so much that imo the obvious response would be to ignore him.