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You might want to at least check the original indictment:

Swartz registered on the network using identifiers chosen to hide his identity as
the computer’s owner and user.
a. The computer was registered under the fictitious guest name “Gary Host.”

I couldn't help but notice that it also mentions intent. The intent to defraud or obtain money or property.

The property is the documents that he downloaded.
I bet if you took the time to look up each charge you wuill find that the charge fits the crime.

Better judgement would have been to not do it at all, or to at least do it so slowly from a machine in a public area that it didn't DOS the server and set in motion events that ultimately lead to his arrest. If MIT / JSTOR had noticed at all in those circumstance then perhaps they would have done nothing more than tell him to knock it off.

From one of the indictments:

11. Between September 24, 2010, and January 6, 2011, Swartz contrived to:
a. break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;
b. access MIT’s network without authorization from a switch within that
closet;
c. connect to JSTOR’s archive of digitized journal articles through MIT’s
computer network;
d. use this access to download a major portion of JSTOR’s archive onto his
computers and computer hard drives;
e. avoid MIT’s and JSTOR’s efforts to prevent this massive copying,
measures which were directed at users generally and at Swartz’s illicit conduct
specifically; and
f. elude detection and identification;
all with the purpose of distributing a significant proportion of JSTOR’s archive through one or
more file-sharing sites.

Where are your references?

Yes: http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/mit-faculty-open-access-policy-faq/

Aaron Swartz wrote a program that automatically downloaded journal articles, and faced 13 felony charges for it.

No, he wasn't.

Have you read the actual charges against him? He comitted up to 13 felonies when he harvested the millions of documents using his program.

That MIT offered free access to the repository via their network didn't give him the right to break into the schools wiring closet, install a computer and hard drive, and download an estimated 20% of the JSTOR archives.

Apparently, http://mit.edu/ has been hacked by Lulzsec.

Apparently, MIT has decided to cut off guest access to jstor

The comments on this "The Tech," "MIT's oldest and largest newspaper & the first newspaper published on the web," online edition are very good:

Aaron Swartz commits suicide By Anne Cai

Well, if only we had some authentication scheme that only required you to authenticate once, and then grant you a token that expired after a certain time, and then you could use that token to authenticate to everything...

http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/dialogue.html

Important fact, JSTOR a private company:

"Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured 'appropriate' out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. " (emphasis mine)-- Prosecutor as Bully, Lessig

I'm actually sad if JSTOR gets tarred by anything here. They may not have agreed with Swartz's actions, but they didn't want him sent to prison over them, and they were the supposed harmed party.

MIT, however, decided to betray its core principles, and they had status as a "secondary victim."

"MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the 'criminal' who we who loved him knew as Aaron."-- Prosecutor as Bully, Lessig

The irony here is that people who know about "the MIT way" would not have expected this out of MIT, but might have expected it out of JSTOR, However, JSTOR deserves a complete pardon here. They refused to play ball with a politically ambitious Fed, and basically should have no blame in any of this.

Meanwhile, MIT should have offered to turn this over to the Federal Prosecutors:

MIT Hall of Hacks.

Why settle for one hacker when you can capture an entire gang? So much evidence, I'm surprised Carmen Ortiz wasn't drooling. I mean, someone stole a police car and placed on the Great Dome! Surely she could have gotten someone prison time for that. Probably every student at MIT has done something that Ortiz and Heymann would find "Juicy," so really they should go hog wild!

[snark]Frankly, shouldn't administrators who allow such a museum, a celebration of criminality and, even worse, disrespect for the rules do some time themselves? They are misleading their students into a life of crime![/end snark]

Frankly, if I were a student at MIT with any talent, I'd be looking to transfer. MIT is over.

The A Slower Speed of Light game from MIT does the same thing, just by slowing the light down to your speed rather than speeding you up to light speed. It's the same, since its all relative.

"Literally" doesn't mean what you think it does, dipshit.

From the site:
"Check out the 3,029,110 projects from around the world!"

There's a fixed amount of carbon in the world - much greater than of any metal, but still fixed.

Incorrect as to the amount, actually (see Table 3). Carbon is WAY down the list.

31.9% of earth's mass is iron
27.9% oxygen
16.1% silicon
15.4% magnesium
(we're already up to 91.3%)
(10 others left out; none of them over 2% each)
0.073% carbon

There is more titanium and more cobalt than there is carbon!

In your idiotic support of the current system you seem to miss out a lot of things. Maybe your ignorance or your unwillingness to confront them leads you to spout this nonsense.

1. MIT's investigation is not about just and unjust actions - it is more about the fact that they did not actively stop the justice department from going after Schwartz. JSTOR aggressively responded to the prosecutorial threat and declined to pursue charges, whereas MIT did not. If MIT too had strongly declined, then, the prosecutor would have very little grounds to prosecute Aaron.

This is the second time I can think of where the MIT administration acted like assholes.

http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html

MIT releases statement, says student’s actions were ‘reckless’

MIT is cooperating with the state police in the investigation, according to a statement released by the MIT News Office this afternoon. “As reported to us by authorities, Ms. Simpson’s actions were reckless and understandably created alarm at the airport,” the statement continues.

In other words we will take the Warren Report, change the name from Kennedy to Swartz, feed it back throught the MIT Paper Generator, and provide it everyone. Proving, that our lack of action in the previous year provided us with the ability to have an annual discourse on our probable deniability, fully exonerating us of apathy, poor judgement and a full disclosure of our tenacious mendacity. Thank you, I'll have my tea now.

Understanding why hackers do this may prevent some future suicides anywhere in the hacker community.

Up to a half dozen students commit suicide any year. Several large lawsuits from the parents of suicide victims in the past decade prompted MIT to beef up round-the-clock mental health care help. Most recently the MIT student newspaper conducted and extensive study of stress in student life. Its almost like coming out gay- plenty of students think they are the only ones suffering from stress and retreat into their personal hell-holes. The need to talk to each other and professionals.

MITIMCo is a division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created to manage and oversee the investment of the Institute's endowment, retirement and operating funds. As of June 30, 2012, MITIMCo had more than $15 billion of total assets under management. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/institute-endowment-figures-0914.html

1) Drones keeping each other informed of their vectors for distributed traffic control.

2) Additional revenue for Internet service provision to wide area near-lines-of-sight of sight to the drones current aloft. This has the added benefit of actually bootstrapping Paul Baran's original intention of packet-switching: route around the damage which, in this case, is damage to the Internet now potentiated by increasing centralization of internet infrastructure.

3) IPv6 offers the potential to finally put into place what I called "the primary discipline of network architecture" when I was designing Knight-Ridder/AT&T's multi-city videotex architecture back in the early 80s: "The terminal is merely the host computer nearest the customer." Getting rid of the client-server paradigm is key to recapturing the internet's potential.

Get in touch with David P. Reed regarding the strategic approach to take for wireless mesh networking in this new regime.

"I'd strongly encourage people today to ignore the IETF, and get focused on mobile, unlicensed wireless, highly reconfigurable and pervasive networking. Pursue overlays and co-existence, and create the next bigger "Internet" - the universal glue for networking things together. "

-- David P. Reed

Open Cobalt's synchronization architecture is a good option for an open peer-to-peer network synchronization standard currently in operation. But, as I said about the wireless mesh standard, contact David P. Reed, as this synchronization standard is based on Reed's PhD thesis, which, with minor modifications, I adopted for videotex architecture clear back in 1982 and it still has no RFC.

1) Drones keeping each other informed of their vectors for distributed traffic control.

2) Additional revenue for Internet service provision to wide area near-lines-of-sight of sight to the drones current aloft. This has the added benefit of actually bootstrapping Paul Baran's original intention of packet-switching: route around the damage which, in this case, is damage to the Internet now potentiated by increasing centralization of internet infrastructure.

3) IPv6 offers the potential to finally put into place what I called "the primary discipline of network architecture" when I was designing Knight-Ridder/AT&T's multi-city videotex architecture back in the early 80s: "The terminal is merely the host computer nearest the customer." Getting rid of the client-server paradigm is key to recapturing the internet's potential.

Get in touch with David P. Reed regarding the strategic approach to take for wireless mesh networking in this new regime.

"I'd strongly encourage people today to ignore the IETF, and get focused on mobile, unlicensed wireless, highly reconfigurable and pervasive networking. Pursue overlays and co-existence, and create the next bigger "Internet" - the universal glue for networking things together. "

-- David P. Reed

Open Cobalt's synchronization architecture is a good option for an open peer-to-peer network synchronization standard currently in operation. But, as I said about the wireless mesh standard, contact David P. Reed, as this synchronization standard is based on Reed's PhD thesis, which, with minor modifications, I adopted for videotex architecture clear back in 1982 and it still has no RFC.

There is no such thing as MALE sexism, or WHITE racism.

Here, these will help, but I warn you: it is gonna hurt reading these. You're gonna get pissy and defensive:

http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf
http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/white_privilege_checklist.pdf

I don't see how the links support your claim.

Just take item 1 from the first link: "My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed." There are a few fields (childcare, for one) where male applicants are at a disadvantage. (Yes, childcare it's not considered a prestigious position; dosen't matter.) It's still male sexism, it is real, and it is still wrong no matter how limited or rare it is.

I'm not trying to drum up sympathy for the poor, suffering white (straight, Christian...) male. I just want to point out that ignoring wrongs just because the wronged party has privilege does not make it right.

There is no such thing as MALE sexism, or WHITE racism.

Here, these will help, but I warn you: it is gonna hurt reading these. You're gonna get pissy and defensive:

http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf
http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/white_privilege_checklist.pdf

I don't see how the links support your claim.

Just take item 1 from the first link: "My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed." There are a few fields (childcare, for one) where male applicants are at a disadvantage. (Yes, childcare it's not considered a prestigious position; dosen't matter.) It's still male sexism, it is real, and it is still wrong no matter how limited or rare it is.

I'm not trying to drum up sympathy for the poor, suffering white (straight, Christian...) male. I just want to point out that ignoring wrongs just because the wronged party has privilege does not make it right.

My re-post from below:

There is no such thing as MALE sexism, or WHITE racism.

Here, these will help, but I warn you: it is gonna hurt reading these. You're gonna get pissy and defensive:

http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf [mit.edu]
http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/white_privilege_checklist.pdf [mit.edu]

My re-post from below:

There is no such thing as MALE sexism, or WHITE racism.

Here, these will help, but I warn you: it is gonna hurt reading these. You're gonna get pissy and defensive:

http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf [mit.edu]
http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/white_privilege_checklist.pdf [mit.edu]

No, it is exactly wrong.

There is no such thing as MALE sexism, or WHITE racism.

Here, these will help, but I warn you: it is gonna hurt reading these. You're gonna get pissy and defensive:

http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf
http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/white_privilege_checklist.pdf

No, it is exactly wrong.

There is no such thing as MALE sexism, or WHITE racism.

Here, these will help, but I warn you: it is gonna hurt reading these. You're gonna get pissy and defensive:

http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf
http://sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/white_privilege_checklist.pdf

"We are covering too many businesses, your responses are flawed in that they focus on one element "profits", "

So is profit not the main goal of a publicly traded company?

"[Software is something I argue they should do] is that maintaining its profitability without expanding its market(exactly what you criticise Amazon for) is short sighted."

Besides the dedicated media player market -- Apple is increasing revenues and profits much faster than the industry in every single one of its markets.

"Googles revenue is up this year 9 month period http://investor.google.com/earnings.html from $19,087,000 to $27,632,000 Their profits are up $8,235,000 and $9,328,000 (they were down last quarter with half a billion restructuring of Motorola, but they sold off their set-top box this quarter for $2.5 billion), "

Of course their revenue was up after adding Motorola, but Motorola is still losing money. Motorola is causing an increase in revenue but a decrease in profit. Not a winning combination

Google's ad revenue is weak.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/weak-ad-revenue-pulls-google-down

"(they were down last quarter with half a billion restructuring of Motorola, but they sold off their set-top box this quarter for $2.5 billion"

So they bought MMI for 12.5 billion, MMI had about $3 billion in cash at the time so that was a net cost of 9.5 billion and now they are selling the settop business for $3 billion. So that is still a net cost of about 6.5 billion on a company that is still losing money. On top of that, Google as part of the deal, is assuming most of the liability for patent infringemenr claims that are being brought by Tivo -- a company who has a track record of winning in court.

"but as I said with Google Docs they already make $1 Billion from Google Docs, and are making a massive push against Microsoft, there on-line store is reportedly selling 400% more in a year,"

The Apple app store is barely above break even profitably and has much higher revenues than the Google Play store. Up 400% from barely anything is still barely anything.

"....but the short version is your view of google is not based in reality...heard about the xPhone :)"

Yes because a rumored phone from a division who hasn't been able to compete for years is definitely a sure fire hit......

"its strategy of going for market-share over profits is working to its advantage going forward...."

http://web.mit.edu/bwerner/www/papers/Therelationbetweenmarketshareandprofitability.PDF

But if market share were the sure fire way to profitability, then why would HP try to jetison their PC business when HP still had the largest market share? Why is the iPhone still more profitable than the rest of the market combined?

"What I predict is Apples business model is unsustainable, and the market agrees with me with it having 30% of its value wipes of its market cap, "

And the market is always rational....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

"Apple should have gone for Microsoft's throat"

Yes because if it had, it might be growing faster than Microsoft now....oh wait, it is,

"but the short version is your view of google is not based in reality...heard about the xPhone :)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BgkCUbeuck

This is my wife driving. Watch the grey SUV on the right lane at 00:09.

You should let your wife know that she was in the wrong lane after that intersection.
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

I wonder what would happen if US colleges (or even earlier in our educational system) let students have free reign, and really specialize

It is called M.I.T.

I was searching if anyone mentioned hr3d, to mod him up. But unfortunately not, so instead of modding i have to mention it myself.

HR3D (high rank 3d display, where rank stands for high rank matrix used in calculations) is the future of 3d displays. It uses the parallax effect, but to much higher extend, using dual or triple stacked LCD displays. Where each display is serving as a special parallax barrier. HR3D is calculation intensive currently, this is why it is not widely adopted. But the computations costs will decrease, and it will become popular. It is not only two viewing angles for two eyes. It can have 16, 25, 36 or even more viewing angles. And you could look from far above, from far below, from far left from far right. And even look behind something. Though generating content for hr3d requires having 16, 25, 36 or even more cameras (each recording from another perspective) instead of just two cameras recording for two eyes. So it is mostly suitable for digital content, or simply put an OpenGL driver to display OpenGL graphics in real 3D. If a movie director wanted to make a movie, with actors, his camera would look like an insect head, due to so many cameras required. Or maybe some special 3D-camera that records everything and recalculated whole scene in 3D.

I am watching their progress, and can't wait when I'll be able to buy some hr3d display with OpenGL drivers for linux. Also if they went IPO I would buy their stock immediately.

Yeah, I always liked that idea myself. It's the kind of solution that an economist would come up with.

Yes, it's something economists came up with. There was a (video) presentation in one of the MIT spam conferences, maybe 2008 or thereabouts, explaining the idea.

And the idea is utter crap, as it completely misses the point that spammers make *other* people pay for the resources being used. They're very good at doing it, that's why spam is such a problem to begin with. Standard economic theory of markets fails completely when dealing with fraud.

"The current learning language for Computer Science is Java."

You may be a little older and behind the current trends. All quality schools I'm aware of teaching CS classes are using Python for several years. Additionally, I think Python surpassed Java for introductory course to 6th graders a couple of years ago.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011/index.htm

http://www.udacity.com/

"The language of choice for Linux/Unix system administration is Perl."
I suspect Python has far surpassed Perl use in general management... Maybe looking at Red Hat or Ubuntu might help with some info.

How about the numerous project in Python compared to Perl?

Well I think a more impressive piece of software than this one would be a program that can "understand" writing and deconstruct the meaning of the message to it's simplest form. If all anonymous writers used the same software, they would all have the same "style."

Obviously you would only use it for writing that needed to be anonymous, because a large part of writing is the personality you put into it.

Here's an example of software that seems to "understand" language, posted to /. in the past:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from-games-0712.html

I just have a different idea of not so long ago. I was thinking pre-PC era, although nobody was thinking about 60fps Wing Commander. But go further forward and read a review of a 3dfx voodoo card, which revolutionised PC gaming, and they'll talk about smooth 30fps gaming: http://tech.mit.edu/V117/N49/threedfx.49a.html

That's 1997 and we're still only talking 16bit colour, so I still think you're lightly rewriting history.

Roll forwards to 2000 and the geforce 256 was the next real revolution.

  http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/leadtek-winfast-geforce-256-ddr-review,157-4.html

They describe 31fps as reasonable, and they're still benchmarking with 16bit colour. Indeed later in that article they refer to 30fps as "the magical barrier".

Also, you must be joking about running windowed for more performance. Dropping resolution, sure, but not windowed. voodoo and voodoo 2 couldn't even do windowed 3d.

Employees cost at least 2x what their salary is, which is one of the many reason programmer freelancers get paid MUCH more.

The actual multiplier is ~2.7X http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html

The problem isn't COBOL by itself. The problem is that COBOL is seen by some as the last and greatest language that has ever been invented and that nothing else could improve upon it other than minor refinements of the language. That is what gives us crazy junk like object-oriented COBOL.

Rethinking computer programming language design has given us a multitude of languages and conceptual models that we can apply to software design and substantially improve the quality of the software being produced. I would be really curious about what Grace Hopper would think of some even higher abstraction levels like Scratch. No single programming language is best for everything, but some are better at accomplishing key tasks over others.

An Actual MIT Professor.

I did the same research as you just did, but a search for Anonymous Coward gives:

No matches to your query.

Confused,

There's essentially 4 ways to transmit electricity wirelessly. Two of them rely on photovoltaics which are nowhere near efficient enough to power a device like a cell phone (not to mention energy lost during conversion to light), one of them relies on microwave radiation which wouldn't be safe, and the last is electro-magnetic induction current. You can do it with heat, too, but that's even less efficient than PV cells, and generally not considered by anybody who has a clue what they're doing.

When using normal magnetic induction, the strength of the magnetic field (and subsequently the amount of energy you can extract from it) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. If you want something strong enough to charge a phone at a distance of a meter, you need to put 400x more energy into it than something to provide the same charge at a distance of 5cm. (5cm * 20 = 1m, 20^2 = 400). The reason that something like this hasn't been done before isn't because it's a new idea, it's because it's horribly inefficient. There's no technical reason the toothbrush's inductant current charger can't work at a greater distance than it does. It's designed to work over short distances because it's more efficient that way.

BTW... this is highschool level physics. Perhaps, just perhaps, you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize that the actual physics behind how technology like this works doesn't change. Also, it's still not a new idea. Note the date on that article. The patent in question was filed in 2010. You are capable of doing the subtraction, right? And since that was done at a publicly funded university....

How about MIT in 2007? This one works over two meters. Would Apple be guilty of patenting an inferior implementation?

I wonder if it is related to this breakthrough by MIT last year. They developed an anti-viral drug which also targets RNA and should, theoretically, be effective against all viruses.

given how bad writing native apps for Android currently is

How bad is it, and what's so bad about it?

I'm an Android (and other platform) developer, and don't really see much difference in difficulty writing for any of the current main mobile OSs.

I don't consider myself particularly highly skilled, but I make a living, and even absolute beginners can block out surprisingly complete software with App Inventor.

http://appinventor.mit.edu/

You're very wrong. The CPI is exactly what you suggest we do - they check prices of common consumer goods in real stores. If the government bogeyman scares you, look at MIT's billion price index. It's an online survey of many prices, updated in real time. And it matches the CPI very accurately.

Source: Medical devices powered by the ear itself - MIT News Office

Also usable elsewhere in the body: New energy source for future medical implants: sugar - Implantable fuel cell built at MIT could power neural prosthetics that help patients regain control of limbs.

Source: Medical devices powered by the ear itself - MIT News Office

Also usable elsewhere in the body: New energy source for future medical implants: sugar - Implantable fuel cell built at MIT could power neural prosthetics that help patients regain control of limbs.

People in 'developing' countries are poor because of local corruption or foreign colonialism, not because of Apple's failure to relocate a factory over there.

And the US workers aren't unemployed because the Chinese and Indian workers are cheaper. They're unemployed because their wealth is so much greater that they can't compete, not to mention their own local corruption and protectionism like the one you're arguing for (the GM story is a great example).

Maybe somebody who is more articulate can pick up...

Here's someone more articulate: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html

Based on the article it sounds a lot like envelope tracking:

The new advance is essentially a blazingly fast electronic gearbox. It chooses among different voltages that can be sent across the transistor, and selects the one that minimizes power consumption, and it does this as many as 20 million times per second. The company calls the technology asymmetric multilevel outphasing.

But looking back at one of their papers: http://www-mtl.mit.edu/~jldawson/Dawson_digest2009.pdf it is not exactly envelope tracking. They are starting out with an outphasing amplifier (dividing the signal into two constant amplitude variable phase signals which can then be amplified with an efficient nonlinear amp and recombined into the original signal) and then adding a discretely variable drain bias (much like an envelope tracker) but the purpose of the variable drain voltage is actually to minimize power dissipation in the combiner's isolation resistor. Thus they compare their efficiency and linearity only to outphasing types of amplifiers. I would be curious to see how this stacks up to pure envelope tracking amplifiers.

I would argue needing a debugger is also a sign of language flaws.

I agree, but for a different reason. A good language is one in which debugging means finding logical flaws in the design of a program; no language can truly achieve this ideal, but some languages come closer than others. I do not think we will ever get rid of debuggers; I think debugging will change, though, when languages like C and C++ go the way of the dodo.

Here, for example, is a tool that helps with debugging high level logic:

http://alloy.mit.edu/alloy/

Give it a try some time; you'd be surprised by how effectively it can find bugs in designs, and by how effectively it can convey what those bugs are. This is the sort of debugging we will need going forward -- not debugging mechanics, but debugging high level logic. Knight Capital didn't go bankrupt because of a null pointer.

What people want for the internet is a persistent stateless anarchy, with no oversight or governence.

Baloney, they want governance that's driven by the network operators. Or don't you think backbone providers should agree on peering arrangements, BGP carriage, etc.? The network operators work for their customers, so what people really want is customer regulation.

I think this is probably what you meant, but it's important to not play loose with the terms - those gaps are where States and NGO's sneak into the cracks.

Anyway, go support Tonika if you're a tech person interested in making this happen on a massive scale.

...you can get a literature degree from MIT

Isn't that what one of the Tappet brothers have?

"Humanities and science", according to Ray's bio:

Anyway, because my brother went to MIT, I guess it was predetermined that I would go there too. I had no choice. And while I was there I studied everything and really learned nothing, and I eventually graduated from MIT in 1972. I ended up with a degree in humanities and science. MIT is known for its humanities program. After all, with a name like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you know they must have a splendid humanities department.

"...and can't read." :-)

The full joke from which that came involved somebody in the "10 items or less" line in a supermarket in Central Square (roughly halfway between Harvard and MIT, although a bit closer to MIT), where somebody's explanation was "either they went to MIT and can't read or went to Harvard and can't count". Not entirely fair, as you can get a literature degree from MIT

Isn't that what one of the Tappet brothers have?

After living for many years in Cambridge, I have become accustomed to this attitude. I want to make a T-shirt "I act like I am smarter than you because I am. I go to MIT".

"...and can't read." :-)

The full joke from which that came involved somebody in the "10 items or less" line in a supermarket in Central Square (roughly halfway between Harvard and MIT, although a bit closer to MIT), where somebody's explanation was "either they went to MIT and can't read or went to Harvard and can't count". Not entirely fair, as you can get a literature degree from MIT and you can get an engineering degree or a science degree from Harvard.