I think the point is that there are already resources out there for people who are genuinely interested, and they're just one Google away. So asking someone to explain some of these very basic things comes across as laziness and insincerity: it's like asking somebody to do your homework for you, or to repeat themselves because you didn't bother to listen the first ten times they said it (anyone remember the whole Amanda Marcotte thing last year?).

As someone said somewhere in this whole imbroglio (and don't ask me where, because I've been wading through far too much of it, and I'm only paraphrasing): if you can use Google to find out the height of Niagara Falls for a geography project, you can use it for this.