cgdangelo
Unfortunately I don't know of anything in the way of custom joysticks/setups that might be helpful, but maybe I can offer some reassurance for your friend. Even with the standard input devices (mouse/keyboard, controller) people[1][2] have been able to adapt to very extraordinary circumstances. Anything's possible.
There's so many things that make this situation _ridiculous_, but this takes the cake. I would have thought that in a case dealing with a few sentences, the full context of those sentences would be important.
I've been aware of this story for a while now and it always boggled my mind. But after reading this, there's some very troubling things going on that I didn't even know about.
Hope he can get out from under all this, recover, and move on with his life.
That was my experience as well. I was pretty comfortable using vim in emergencies but the few times I tried to make it my full-time IDE failed very quickly. Once I stole Gary Bernhardt's dotfiles[1] I was able to stick with it because I didn't have to start from scratch with keymaps, plugins, etc.
I typically deploy with a similar setup that you described, but instead of rsync'ing the files locally I just make a clone of the repo and serve that. Though it is another step to fetch/merge, it stops me from losing any changes that someone did to production without telling me.
I only recently used Capistrano to deploy a project and it was very satisfying, so I'm gravitating towards that as my default deployment method.
This always bothered me in many of my math classes. We'd go over a new formula or concept and just hammer it home until it stuck. Professors rarely gave real-world examples of the topics they were teaching or indicated to the students how these new theorem interacted with others. If I asked them explicitly I might get a more practical explanation, but it was rarely offered to me without inquiring first.
I used to have a lower opinion of people who'd complain about learning math because "it's so pointless, I'll never use any of this." It bothered me that they just didn't want to learn something new. In hindsight, even if that were partly true, I can't blame them for having that attitude because it may have been partially instilled in them by their professors.
I'll never forget the feelings I had after I connected the dots in my head and noticed the relationship between integrals. I knew that integration would give me the area underneath a curve, but now we were learning about double and triple integrals for surface area and volume. It dawned on me that I'm basically doing the same thing I was before, albeit in several planes with more curves. I remember a lot of different emotions: appreciation for the sensibility and beauty of mathematics; pride that I figured something out on my own; but also a tinge of frustration that this revelation was never encouraged by my professor.
Jita's the busiest economic hub in the game, so they're effectively shutting down a sizable chunk of the game's trade. Though it's in a secure area, inasmuch as the in-game police will kill you for attacking other players, so many ships are involved that they can just suicide attack even the larger vessels before being stopped.
I doubt this will actually "break" the economy though. I imagine it will be disrupted for a time until the campaign ends or trade moves elsewhere.