By contrast to Nate Eldredge's answer about mathematics faculty, for faculty in engineering/science fields at some institutions, graduating Ph.D. students is actually one of the key requirements for obtaining tenure.  The theory is that successfully supervising Ph.D. students is one of the primary tasks of research-oriented faculty.  As a result, selecting a graduate student is likely to be much higher stakes for such faculty, and they may be either more conservative (i.e., "Can't risk a bad one") or more risky (i.e., "Gotta make sure at least some graduate!") depending on their personality and funding.

Are there any differences in how new vs. well-established professors select students?
I'm creating a multiplayer game(based in websockets) which runs directly from the browser and which has multiplayer functionality. Each player needs to have his own account(Username and password). When I was planning the game, I realized that the easiest way to migrate it to other platforms is writing it in HTML5. So, I need to create a login system using JS and websockets. But I'm not sure of how secure is to send a message with a content like username and password to the websocket server(which runs in a Java virtual machine).
