Just a more elaborate way of saying the same. The two questions are actually related. Because of the way we have defined words like 'Chicken' and 'sound'. At some point of the evolution of chickens we have put a line. Before which we would have called the bird something else. Then the necessary evolution/mutation happened and a new chicken would have been something else than both its parents, so the egg was first (as at least pixellany and I agree). Actually the reputable BBC agree too:

On sound and trees falling. Check this definition in Wiktionary:
On this definition, if there is no-one there to hear the falling tree, there is no sound.

Maybe Linux people are more evolved than others and that's why philosophical things appear here

Now that I think of it, and being more serious, there is such a thing as psychological deafness, something I suspect my grandmother has. Her hearing is perfectly fine, but she doesn't hear important things, for example an ambulance (with sirens and lights on) almost ran her down, and damn those things are noisy, but she never heard it coming. This is explained due to the fact that her brain was ignoring signals from he ears at the time (a bad decision). However, she often manages to hear things said in whisper tone, things she wasn't supposed to hear ... had a number of negative experiences with this ... don't assume she can't hear you, she can if she wants to.

No. It's one of those unfathomable mysteries, never to be solved, destined to plague and ultimately destroy the finest intellects.

Here goes completely unnecessary answer:

Because technical problems ("meaningful posts", as I suppose) are all solved in same way (search google, read manual, read code, ask for help, give up), and solution for those haven't much room for creativity/fun. It is just finding facts and presenting them to the people. Even google-fu becomes boring after a while. Also when polite people don't know answer, they don't provide useless information, so that's why posts are "ignored". Also if questions is too simple (basic, OP "didn't do his homework"), many people won't post answer (because they'll think OP is too lazy).

Meaningless posts are fun, because there is space for creativity - it's like (unofficial) competition where everyone tries to make as much fun as possible from initial statement, tries to invent new joke, etc.

I.e. presenting facts is boring unless you feel generous and like playing role of tech support for a while. Mockery of "meaningless posts" is fun because you might have a laugh in process, and you might invent new joke, etc. The exception from this are unique technical problem, that are rare and require a lot of thinking. In this case you get satisfaction when you finally solve problem.

Was the squirrel up the tree that fell silently?

Yes, the unfortunate squirrel sat in the silently falling tree. The chicken, having no ears, made sound disappear. Similar to H_TeXMeX_H's grandmother making sound of sirens disappear.
Luckily the chicken had seen the tree and crossed the road to avoid it.
Poor squirrel sat in the tree. Not sure what happened to it.

Schrodinger scraped it up off the road and fed it to that cat he keeps in a box.

Close!. But how many dead squirrel's do you see in the road that failed so successfully navigate it before a vehicle came along and flattened them? How many dead chickens in similar circumstances?

Thus proving that chickens have better road sense than squirrels, but are lousy teachers.

Despite your credible explanation, I must disagree, and assert that the same type of question could also be applied to system administration. For example,

If Windows crashes, and no one hears my scream of anguish, did I make a sound?

EDIT: Someone had to post this link, why not me?
http://www.comedycorner.org/54.html

This isn't technical question

"In space no one can hear you scream".

In space you would not have a chance to scream because you would already have exploded into little chunks before you could scream.

Nice chunks to be fed to mr Schroedinger's cat together with the dead squirrel. This is the cat that is both alive and dead at the same time. The alive one needs to be able to stay alive and not die as well. Quantum physics would be even more bizarre if it did...