The question is, who are you worried will find this super secret sensitive information (Your name, address and fact you use the site)?
The government? They don't need to intercept the e-mail they have easier ways of knowing it?
Some criminal targeting you specifically who manged to intercept this e-mail? He already knows who you are all he learned is you use this site,
simply seeing the IP is enough?
Some random script kiddie on the internet? intercepting e-mails is not that easy, yes they are in plain text but they are not broadcast over the internet for everyone to see
you have to position yourself along the route it travels (and this route normally doesn't change much) and attack somewhere along it, not impossible but hardly effortless. and why would he?
Which only leaves corporate espionage targeted against the site you are visiting, which though more likely then any other vector still seems a bit far fetched, and in the end all they learn is your name&address.
There are plenty of serious threats out there on the internet, this doesn't seem like one of them.
focus your worrying else where.

In many cases in the past building a power grid resilient to small power outages, automatically rerouting power around failed components
only leads to it being more susceptible to large power failures caused by cascading failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_outage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

which is an excellent site which give metrics on open source projects number of developers,
lines of code progression over time and many more useful graphs and metrics to help assess how active an open source software is
and what is the trend.

We build and operate manned aircrafts to a very very high safety standard.
A simple software upgrade for a manned aircraft takes years to complete, because of the standards employed.
When operating manned aircrafts we have strict standards as well on how to do everything and many many small and large things we don't do.
These are all very limiting both in the cost they impose and in the ability to get the job done.
We use unmanned aircrafts so we operate more freely both when building and when flying them, this comes with a higher accident rate from all causes but that
is the whole point.
We need to remember unmanned aircrafts are not only cheaper then their manned counterparts they also do things the manned counterparts can't or won't do.

In modern days education is more accessible, and almost everyone strives to get higher education, the result is more college graduates on the market, which allows more position to require a degree which drives more kids to college and the cycle continues.
This also causes more colleges to open up, many of them sacrificing quality and it helps raise the cost of education.
The root issue is lack of feedback between the job market and the universities.
We need the number of seats in colleges and universities to be closely related with limited surplus to the job market requirements.
The colleges will not self regulate and limit the number of seats because too many of them are in the business of making money,
and though this is very unpopular I see no solution other then some sort of governmental regulation to limit the number of seats fro bachelor degrees which will both increase the quality of graduates and save a whole lot of money on wasted tuition and years out of the job market.

Even after taking into account that not every incoming missile will be intercepted
It requires a more advance more sophisticated more expensive weapon to shoot down a cheap missile.
a Vulcan Phallanx is more expensive than a mortar unit and you need many of them to protect even a smallish area.
An Iron Dome interceptor is more complicated and expensive than a Kasam or Grad rocket.
An Arrow missile is likewise more advanced and more expensive then a Scud or even a Shihab/Sagil missile.
This is why such defense makes sense for Israel vs Terror organizations
but make little sense for USA vs USSR.
Israel has a budget much larger than Hamas and can afford expensive solutions.
Some argue the cost for the enemy is irrelevant, it is only cost for the protective side vs potential damage from the threat
And when you add to the potential damage not only the direct damages of a missile attack but the ability of the population to continue living
a normal productive life during a time of conflict, you quickly see the cost of expensive Iron Dome interceptors is well worth it.
The trade-off becomes less favorable for the larger missiles, unless you fear unconventional weapons or are protecting strategic sites.

When I have something performance sensitive I can always work hard to optimize it, and even switch to a different platform
for some small part of the project.
The question therefor is not how fast can I write it, but how easy is it, this has a lot to do about libraries and tools but language makes a difference too.
The JVM environment is an excellent environment to work in, with a plethora of excellent libraries and tools (including the Tomcat server).
Yet the Java language is falling rapidly behind, and C# is rapidly gaining new bells and whistles while Java is stagnating,
I find it mind buggling Java 7 doesn't have lambda expressions.
That's why I have switched to Scala which gives all the good of the JVM in a modern functional yet object oriented language
giving me all the protection of a strongly typed static language yet with minimal boilerplate reminding me of dynamic languages.

It seems to me a x75 increase in power efficiency should be worth to nVidia (or any competitor) much more than $20M, why does DARPA need to fund this, this seems exactly like the kind of work which doesn't need DARPA money. DARAPA should spend money where it is not clearly economic for others to do so.

Free speech is a sacred right, even murderers have it.
However encouraging people to commit crimes when there is good reason to believe someone will act upon your words
is illegal pretty much anywhere.
Hamas should not be censored because they are evil (they are as evil as they come),
They should be censored when they call for terror or other illegal activity.
I myself have not read too many of their twitter posts so I don't know if they use them to spread general propoganda (false or other)
or if they overtly call for terrorism.
All of this is purely on the moral aspects of censorship, ignoring the effectiveness of censoring twitter.
I suspect censoring Hamas effectively may prove difficult.

If we study our history we will learn that Hamas started using rockets as it's main weapon only after the security fence made suicide bombings less practical.
When you close off one option for the enemy he will inevitably find a new one, preferably a less effective one
but this is not to say you shouldn't close off his options.
We also need to remember that the modern warfare is more about morale then number of casualties, The Hamas wants as many Israelis as possible to live in fear, killing them is just an added bonus. having an effective defense makes the civilians under attack feel less defenseless.

Nist started the SHA-3 competition when SHA-1 was proven weak, and no one was sure how long SHA-2 would last,
no one liked the idea of relying solely on the wide pipe SHA-512 when the underlying building blocks have been proved week, (using SHA-512 is a bit like using triple-DES).
However it is difficult to predict advances in cryptography, and though SHA-512 is not nearly as weak as we predicted it would be a few years ago, we don't know what new cryptanalysis will show up tomorrow, forcing us to leave SHA-2 family in a hurry.
So it is very good we have 5 new well studied hash functions. Choosing one now would do little good, because it could prove weaker tomorrow just like SHA-2 could.
If we don't pick a winner now and keep them all on ice, we could pick from them easily and quickly a replacement when we need it.

I work on a Logitech K350, and I also found the change quite annoying,
but nothing else comes close in battery life. 8 months and counting without replacing batteries in the keyboard
or in the M705 mouse to go with it.
I am mostly accustomed to the changed layout, but I hit delete accidently way too many times for the first couple of months.

Conventional drip coffee maker are only conventional in the US.
In other parts of the world these are very rare.
Arround here (Israel) most people think espresso is "high quality" and
would buy when eating out, or at the local coffee stand.
At home people will either drink instant coffee, preferably from freeze-dried grains,
or "Turkish" cofee made by simply adding boiling water to ground roasted beans and letting the "mud" sink down.
purists will make the cofee in a finjan and bring the water to a boil several times, this is particularly popular among Israeli arabs.

Can't seem to find any code/documentaion or anything downloadable,
And they alrgedly have something working.