I was trying to debug an apache configuration a couple of days ago. On some forum someone was asking what was the cause of a certain warning/error message and what to do to fix it. The first answer was (almost verbatim) "There is something wrong with your apache configuration. Go read the documentation." Gee, thanks. How useful. I feel so enlightened. I couldn't have figured that out on my own.

RTFM is a stupid answer to any question. If you think the question is not worth answering because it is in the documentation just move on with your life. The world is not a better place because you posted RTFM. Doing so strikes me as pathetically saying "Oh I read the book and I want credit for that. Please?" Take a literature class or something. You can get college credit for reading books that way.

On the other hand, I ask questions whenever I can instead of RTFM for the same reason stackoverflow is great: it saves time. Come to think of it, that's the same reason people W comments, documentation and TFM in the first place: all the information is contained in the code, but we need a more efficient way of navigating through it. It is not about all the information being somewhere. It is about being able to extract the relevant parts quickly. Having someone who has RTFM point you in the right direction is a lot more efficient than RTFM.