You're being a bit unfair. It's equally inappropriate for me to speculate about his motives, but I recall there being an undercurrent of melancholia in Aaron's writings even pre-indictment.
The filtering phenomenon is obsolete; as you note, GM probably still cares because it's old fashioned, but modern companies don't care at all. Even if the filter exists/existed, that's hardly a sufficient or effective motivation to start a startup -- good startup founders don't seem like the type who'd just take a salaried gig and become complacent if it was offered to them.
There's probably some traits useful to startup founders that are more common amongst dropouts than the general population -- like a willingness to take responsibility for one's future into one's own hands.
Find a good therapist (psychologist) to talk to about this. Working through shyness will be a long process, and having a smart caring person to coach you through it will be a big help. Therapists are people who are genuinely interested in helping people in this way, and they have been developing and honing the relevant set of skills. I'd say it's important to find someone who works well for you and your personality, so maybe it would help to talk to a few to see who you have the best rapport/connection with.
Exactly right, and a self-deprecating meek geek with bad posture who comes to realize that the world works this way can use this information to his advantage. First, observe that social skills can be learned the same way as anything else: by making empirical observations and performing experiments, and combining this with analysis and theory. More specifically: Actively seek out friends and opportunities for socialization and force a constant minimum level of social activity [empirical observations]. Push your boundaries and don't fear unfamiliar social situations [experiments]. Observe yourself in social situations and (dispassionately) note what you could have done better [analysis]. Read everything from pop psych self-help stuff (e.g. succeedsocially.com) to social psychology and evolutionary psychology (e.g. books and papers describing nonverbal communication and social signaling) [theory]. Learn to project confidence yet be your own worst critic. Be extremely aware of the breadth of your ignorance but don't be sheepish about what you have learned and done. Understand when to be a little hubristic and when to be a little deferential. These are things that we all do automatically to one degree or another, but we can all be more effective by actively observing ourselves and deliberately making adjustments. The downside is that getting better at these skills will necessarily involve a lot of fucking up, but the alternative is to just stay where you are without improving things.
You just need to respect copyright. So if they explicitly allow you to scrape the data, or if you're operating within the "Fair Use" doctrine, then you're fine.
The problem is that the versions of the non-macports Ruby/Python/etc aren't managed by the ports system. So you're in for weird dependency mismatches if you upgrade your system version of Python.
Self-contained keeps it simpler. Just use a script to set up your $PATH as needed.