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I have seen many stupid questions on Stack Overflow, some of them asked by moderators! And they are up-voted many times, while questions which are really very important are sometimes down voted!
Due to this, sometimes I feel that Stack Overflow has issues with internal politics. Even now, when I try to point this out, this question might be down voted and/or closed.
There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid people...and they can vote.
Please note that many (most) of these were created in the very early days of SO while the community was still defining what it felt was acceptable and what was not.
If you feel a post is so bad that it should be taken care of immediately, flag it for moderator attention.
Otherwise I suggest you answer questions, gain rep, and start closing questions yourself - the community is self-defining, and you can be a part of that process as soon as the community gives you the votes that will allow you to participate.
As I mentioned in the last podcast, I'm still bitter about that LOGO "question" Joel added.
In my not-so-humble opinion, unless we encourage questions that are actually interesting, at least a little, to skilled questioners -- then we're squarely in Yahoo Answers! territory.
And that's not a good place to be.
Every question you link to is a bit special in some way.
The first two were contributions from the Co-creators of the site. They tend to get more upvotes than a regular contributor.
The last few are very old questions. They would probably not be allowed these days, but they have been grandfathered in.
Early on questions didn't come in as quickly as they do now and there was less activity in general. Idle hands...you know. Also, early on the lack of questions to answer made asking questions, even if you didn't really have any pressing problems, more profitable with respect to reputation gain. I've asked a few questions myself in the past -- most since moved to meta -- that I probably wouldn't ask today out of boredom, a drive to get rep in the absence of questions to answer, etc.
These are questions the community has accepted as part of the StackOverflow repertoire. If you find they are not to your taste you can ignore their tags, minimizing the chances one will float by. For each user there will be some sort of signal/noise ratio with what is posted on the site, it's just that "signal" and "noise" are defined differently for each person. It comes with the territory of a community driven and managed site.
