It a tough balance.

On one hand, the negative karma point or vote is a bit like a slap in the face.
On the other hand, a post saying "You forgot to Google - take a hike!" would be an even harder slap in the face.

I don't like when the negative votes are used too often, or like some kind of revenge. But alas, I don't think I have seen any real good end-user method for stopping other posters from exploding after too many repeated questions in a row and no way to release the pressure. A working solution is forums with enough moderators to almost instantly react and lock/erase/warn/inform or whatever is needed to keep down the daily friction.

For a high-volume forum, you may have enough volunteer moderators that are neutral enough and available enough to do a good job.
For a low-volume forum - especially a forum where a lot of regulars are having a full-time job or other reasons for not being constantly available to look for new posts - the available moderators would probably need email or RSS support to allow quick enough notification when there are new posts to read.

8052.com is a bit small to have several moderators more or less constantly online and supervising. And it most probably do not have RSS or mail support to keep moderators up-to-date will all new posts.

And for a forum with hard moderation to work reasonably well, the moderators should also have a method of sending private messages to anyone, just so that a warning can be issued in silence.

In the end, it will be very hard to get everything fluent, where a new visitor gets a reasonably nice answer helping them out (directly or by suggestion of good keywords to goole for) while the regulars at the same time can manage to keep their blood pressure in check and not be too irritated by the typical FAQ questions being constantly repeated.

Maybe a good computer science project would be to design an auto-analyzer for the initial post of new threads. If the post gets a good enough match with a knowledge database entry, then the poster will be shown the FAQ entry and has to answer yes/no to the question if the FAQ entry matches their problem. If the FAQ entry is matching the query, then no thread gets created. If the help engine works well enough, it would be possible to sell it to commercial help desks. A lot of commercial help desks have so stupid mail handling that every support mail they get are answered with a 'this seems to be a FAQ-related question...' and requires the requester to notice and respond to the answer mail before even getting their really important support issue to get registered.

Allthough some members here think, that lazy students are responsible for airplane crashes, swine flu and other disasters, I don't think that it is a crime to offer help to someone, who might not be worth it. I do not want to judge and think about whether someone is worth it or not. I'm not the police, I'm not the teacher of the student and this is place wasn't founded to save the mankind either. This is a forum to discuss 8051 related issues and other technical issues in the chat board, nothing else.

But instead of this, we behave like the police, the ministry of education and the internet patrol. We restrict ourselves to punish lazy students which violate petty and senseless forum rules instead of discussing technical issues.

I'm not at all interested in the lazy student! To the hell with him, if he isn't smart enough to see why hard work is worth to be done. Let him steel everything here, but I'm not willed to infect myself with his negativismn. I think positive about people, the world, my job, not because everything is good, but because I do not want to live the life of a disappointed and paranoid person. The lazy student will get a bloody nose and judge himself faster than he can think. I don't fear him at all either, because due to my hard work over years and decades I will always be better than him. So why should I worry about the foolness of an idiot?