I get your point and I usually try to gage the techincal level of the person I'm helping and how interested they are in learning new stuff and explain/fix accordingly, but the author still has a point, way too many people these days have no idea how to do anything on a computer and the situation only gets worse when parents try to tell the world that their kids are "tech natives" when in fact they know nothing more than how some socialnetwork's UI works.

For example I graduate couple years ago from basic computer science vocational institution where we learned how computer hardware works, how to install a new OS and basics of web developement (PHP & MySQL), but now all of my former class mates contact me for tech help through skype even though they should all be "IT literate", but it was just a degree with for most of them, something to waste couple years on to figure out what they wanted to do.

Now I'm studying a computer science engineering degree and easily 1/3 of my class mates have no idea how to code or even how to use basic HTML and CSS tags and we've been at it for 2 years now, sure they are passing "Java 101", but if you gave them a task to write a piece of software most would just raise their hand in air and state "I can't do that" without even giving it a go and I know this I've been trying to recruit new blood to tech club where we write simple apps for Android phones for fun, experience and credit.