Once they've confirmed that I'm willing to pay, how many times will they come back?

You know the answer to that... once you've paid the Danegeld, you'll never get rid of the Dane.

Accepting your premise...

It sounds like the Germans need to set up some big filter plants that do nothing but intake, filter, and exhaust the air, if their air is so shitty that running it through a coal fired power plant cleans it.

It depends on where hemp out performs. If hemp doesn't grow as well where cotton does then you cotton growing land becomes much less valuable.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton was wrong... it doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes a group of bulldozers.

there's more to it than just Mary Jane. You don't think the cotton lobby has noticed the wonder material that is hemp?...

Any software requiring documentation is broken.

I blame Bob Wallace.

Bob Wallace was one of the originators of the concept of "shareware", and he got paid not for his software. This made people wonder how Quicksoft was able to stay in business.

When questioned about this at one convention, he made circling motions with his hands on either side of his head, and said "Software is ... all up here ... it's not real, it's ephemeral. I don't sell software, I sell manuals". So Quicksoft made its money, and its livelihood in the margin between the cost of mass-producing a manual vs. printing it out from a floppy disk and using up a bunch of tractor feed paper and expensive ribbon.

Or, to put it another way, Quicksoft made their money by having a relatively feature-full product which was nearly impossible to use without documentation. And people have been mistakenly trying to copy his success by utilizing the same technique, ever since.

Why did WordPerfect lose out to Microsoft Word? It wasn't because WordPerfect didn't already own the market; it did. It wasn't because Microsoft Word had more features; it didn't. Was Word a lot better, intrinsically, than WordPerfect? It actually wasn't.

Frankly, it was because of the F1 key. By the time WordPerfect got around to deciding they needed a "Help!" key, some of the function keys were already assigned, and so they assigned the next available one to be the "Help!" key. It helped sell a hell of a lot of keyboard templates. And it hid the help from anyone who'd experimentally go looking for it by hitting unlabeled keys in order until they found it (in fact, this would totally screw you up in WordPerfect).

Microsoft hit on a UX innovation: when something goes wrong, make the "Help!" key the first key someone is likely to hit, before all other keys.

And then they did it one better: The F1 was assigned to be the "Help!" key in *all* their products. Instead of just being a great UX thing, locating the key where they did on the basis of probability, they turned it into a Schelling Point: anyone who wanted "Help!" in any Microsoft product knew where to go to find it, if they had ever used some other Microsoft product, and needed "Help!" there.

So back to the original question: should you invest in documentation? Well, yes... if your product has already failed to the point where it's nearly impossible to use without documentation, or because, like Bob Wallace, you intentionally made it nearly impossible to use without documentation because that's one of the premises of your business model.

Maybe you want to write books on your project, once it's used by enough people to make that profitable, and that's how you plan to turn your hobby into a vacation fund. Or maybe you want to get to be a published author about a product so you get hired as a tech writer somewhere, or you get a lot of speaking engagements, and monetize your efforts that way. But if making your product hard to use was one of your initial conditions, then I think your software is broken.

the truly smart people, you're Eisenstein and what have you, are too busy with the incredibly interesting problems they can comprehend to bother with the sort of wealth gathering that you're thinking of when you say "meritocracy". The ones that we're talking about when we say "inequality" aren't all that brilliant. They're loaded with advantages from generations of accumulated wealth. They're rent seekers. The "Investor Class". People who spend their entire day not solving problems or building things or making new things but just figuring out who to gather wealth.

You'll never have your meritocracy. Eisenstein was too busy with relativity to bother trying to run a county. Now Mitt Romney, he's got plenty of time for it. He's also got a Car Elevator...

I think if you look you'll find most basic research (e.g. the really expensive stuff that's hard to do) is paid for by your gov't (or European gov'ts if you live in the USA, we've been cutting funding left and right since Reagan...).

NASA (along with a lot of German Rocket scientists) got us to the moon and DARPA + the Universities created the communication network we're using now...

I guess Capitalism got us the 99 cent double cheeseburger. Oh wait, it was gov't farm subsidies that make that possible too....

it's a dictatorship and/or kleptocracy that happens to use communist rhetoric. Why this fact escapes so many people is beyond me. Maybe it's the 75+ years of indoctrination and thinly veiled McCarthyism...

1) Make rules that prevent anyone from doing anything.
2) Waive rules for people and companies you favor.

Now you effectively control who gets to do anything, and all in the name of the environment, or puppies, or whatever your original rule purported to protect.

It's also cute when someone who can't spell attempts to "correct" a theoretical physicist on a physics topic, and their correction is wrong:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

I suppose we'll have to take the bad with the good.

I've known "rock star" coders. If you don't want someone like Vint Cerf or W. Richard Stevens or Kirk McKusick or Eric Allman or Mike Karels or Dennis Ritchie or Sam Leffler on your team, then you are a freaking idiot.

And if you haven't heard it before, then you've probably never done a startup in Silicon Valley: Talent attracts talent.

I'm not saying that filling out an awkward online form is necessarily a test for a tech job, but it may be... Can you follow directions? Can you restate your prior job responsibilities in a format other than your prepared resume?

I think you're misunderestimating just how bad many of these things are. They aren't just badly designed. They hang, they freeze, they throw ASP errors just before the final submit (or just after, leaving you wondering if it sent or not).

The reason seems obvious: In most cases, the output either goes straight to File 13, or goes to some CYA file and is never actually looked at. They're applications for non-jobs.