I usually stay away from meta matters, but this is an issue I feel strongly enough about to want to contribute something to the discussion on. To make this actually an answer to the original question, you should see it as an attempt to explain why, if it were solely up to me, I would have a policy requiring that users posting "homework" questions (broadly interpreted) should indicate that they have spent some reasonable amount of time (generously interpreted) thinking about the problem before posting. (As I have stated in the comments, I'm not actually in favour of such a policy without more community support than there seems to be).
My experience of the education system in the UK is that during primary and secondary education (everything pre-university), a huge number of students are taught, ususally a little indirectly, that the most important thing when given a mathematical problem is to be able to get the answer correct. Actually understanding what the question is asking, or what the answer means, is not important at all, and nor is the ability to solve problems in a creative way. This attitude seems to be promoted in two main ways. The first is that students are constantly made to sit exams, and the schools rise and fall based on the exam results. The second is that the exam questions very rarely require any deep understanding or creative solutions - the actual content of the syllabus varies a little between exam boards, but the general theme is that even at A-Level (I think high school level is the US analogue), no proofs are required, and most of the syllabus consists of differentiating and integrating various expressions - the result being that the act of answering a question and the act of thinking about and understanding a question are more removed from each other than they generally would be, and the latter isn't much of a prerequisite for the former.
When these students go to university to do mathematics degrees, they regularly don't recognize the subject compared to what they did at school, and reactions to this are often either very positive or very negative. Those who react negatively tend not to like questions asking them to prove things, and prefer situations where all the questions they are asked have the same basic structure, and they can perform an algorithm to solve them (such students tend to be good at a lot of first year linear algebra - computing row echelon forms, sifting spanning sets, computing determinants and inverses and so on). However, what all the students (at least at the universities I've taught at) have in common is that they got very high marks in school, and are often extremely embarassed to find that they're now getting things wrong, or not understanding what they're being taught.
This reaction can be so extreme that ocasionally students will try to get a correct answer to a problem in whatever way they can - at the university I currently teach at, the problem sheets don't change too much from year to year, and one or two students usually manage to obtain the previous year's solutions, and even though the problem sheets do not count for credit, will write these model solutions down and hand them in to be marked. This demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the fact that the problem sheets only exist for them to practice problem solving and to get feedback on their work - the model solutions are always provided anyway after the deadline, so they still get a "perfect" solution at the end of the process.
Students will also sometimes ask TAs (such as me) to just tell them the answers to problems - when a student does this I will always ensure that they've spent time thinking about the problem before I tell them anything. Often they haven't, to the point that they haven't even looked up the appropriate definitions. Once they've done that, I usually proceed with hints. The reason is that, as I've said in the comments, my attitude is that the process of thinking about the problem is more useful than getting the answer (and they'll get the answer later anyway). Being able to solve problems creatively is both significantly more useful in university level exams than school level exams (and students don't realise this at first), and I would guess is usually much more useful in "real life" after they finish their degree. I certainly find the problem solving skills I learnt on my degree programme significantly more useful than the actual information, and I do mathematical research for a living... Asking (politely) what somebody has tried is also a good way of starting a useful discussion on the problem.
These students will also ask questions online, and I try to respond in the same way (although the process of giving hints is a little more difficult on a platform like this). This is the reason for my WHYT comments. They aren't meant to be snarky, or accusations of cheating, as some users have suggested (although I take responsibility for the fact that the tone and motivation was appparently unclear), but are intended to be genuinely helpful in encouraging questioners to think before asking - while it may seem obvious to some of us, I genuinely believe that some questioners have not yet internalized that this will be helpful, and instead are satisfied with receiving a correct answer whether they understand it or not. I also believe that anybody providing full answers to such questions, as good-intentioned as they might be, is actually harming the education of the asker. I also think this is true independent of whether they got the question from a problem sheet given to them on a course, or if it was from a resource they are using for self-study.
To clarify my views on this slightly, I should also make plain a few things that I don't think. The primary one is that I don't think every user that copy-pastes a question from a textbook or an assignment does so without thinking about it. However my feeling is that the cost to such users of having to provide some indication of this is outweighed by the benefit to those who haven't thought before asking of being encouraged to do so. This is particularly true as this extra information is often helpful to answerers in ways that have been regularly pointed out by other commentators (neither of my two questions are "homework", and I tried to give an indication of my thoughts on both problems). I imagine that this could really be the main point of conflict here, that some users feel that requiring this additional effort on the part of askers is intrusive and outweighs any benefits. I can't really give an objective justification as to how the pros and cons on this point stack up - nor even imagine what such a thing would look like - so I can understand this just being a difference in priorities between different users.
Brian's point about askers for whom English is not a first language is a very good one, but I would hope that my requirement to indicate some effort is sufficiently minimal that they could get by without having to explain in detail what they did. If nothing else, an indication that English is not their first language could maybe be taken in lieu of an indication of prior thought, and would encourage answerers to write in simple English. Either way, I accept that this particular issue is a tricky one that my suggestion does not address very well.
The other thing I don't think is that users who copy-paste homework problems without thinking about them are necessarily cheating, or committing any kind of sin by doing so. As I said at the beginning, at least in the UK there are certain features of the education system that actively encourage this kind of behaviour, and I think many students who are harming their own education by doing this don't realise it - some polite encouragement to think before asking can be useful in this case I think. This is also why I described the assignment system at my own university, to emphasize that I still think this behaviour is harmful even when cheating is technically impossible because no credit is awarded.
Sorry this turned out to be so long - I hope at least it clarifies where I'm coming from on this issue and adds something to the debate.
