No-one's perfect. We all ask stupid questions, many of us have crazy things in our online profiles, and we've all gone off the rails at some level or another. Employers who want to see people who are 100% "proper" all the time at their interviews are idiots.
And, no, I have no problem with employers like these pulling up this very message and reading it back to me in the future because I'll know they're not worth working for. Smart employers use smart criteria.
it's similar to the need of all college grads to clean up their facebook profile.
P.S. I used a handle to ask "stupid" questions on USENET, more than a decade ago, and now I wish I had asked them under my own name: the people who replied to me where pioneers of systems programming, and geek-gods.
Questions on one account, and Answers on the other.
I have no idea how to delete the questions I've asked already though, the system doesn't seem to allow for account and question deletion.
But this is the way I'm going... nuke everything, start again with 2 two accounts.
Reputation is starting to become a bitch online, no-one is always impeccable and because of the power of search we stand to be judged on the few dumb things we do.
The only way to counter it seems to be to act as if online there is a Stasi watching and to only put against our identity that which we wish to be judged by at any future point in our lives... which certainly doesn't include the dumb questions we might ask when it's 11pm and we're tired of fixing some annoying issue or defect.
I would say that these recent changes now reduce the value of these sites for me. I'll use it as a resource but I'm now less likely to contribute.
One of the most positive realisations after I left my employment in a large corporation was that everyone is unique and different, with special quirks and "dumb things they do" and weird stuff attached to them. The myth of the perfect corporate drone is just that - a myth. Everyone does weird stuff. It's just that, within the corporate environment, that weird stuff is repressed and hidden, so you never get to find out about it.
Hopefully the corporate world will wake up to this some day and become a competitive employer again - I mean, hopefully for them. I'm sure some of the leading companies (large and small) out there are already ahead of that curve, and they have an edge over more backwards rivals who only hire people who behave "properly" all the time.
All that said: admitting I might be atypical, if you gave me your SO profile, I'd be curious whether you were asking well-thought-out questions and providing reasoned answers--not what your question:answer ratio was, or what topics you needed questions and answers on. Although I see one hell of a lot of posturing, both her and on reddit, that "real" programmers would never deign use StackOverflow, most "real" programmers I know, no matter how experienced, at some point, have to use a technology they've never used before, and get stuck with something simple. The ones I'd hire at that point go ask a question; the ones I wouldn't spend the next eight hours stumbling through manpages because their pride prevents them admitting they might have a knowledge gap.