I would say the national highway system has fared pretty well.... At least in the 48 continental anyway. Sure its aging and it needs some upkeep but it has been there since the days of Eisenhower. I am also pretty partial to the library system. More state and county admittedly, but there is no need or additional benefit to making it a federal system. Perhaps the solution is for states to institute their own governmental health care. Maybe not. Point being, what we have right now doesn't work.

We knew WPA was broken when it was released. It was inconvenient to wait for better IEEE security standards, so the WPA standardized on what was already implemented (which was still much better than what was out there). Ie, convenience trumps security, because wireless is all about convenience. WPA2 isn't that much better in this regard.

For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why?

Because, until fairly recently, it was, in most parts of the state, a local government granted monopoly, and while the local carriers have changed hands (largely to consolidate regions and create bigger regional monopolies), there are significant barriers to entry in any local market, which means that the monopoly carriers are pretty well entrenched, with the main competition coming from alternatives to cable (satellite, services delivered over internet, though the cable providers themselves are also some of the biggest broadband providers) rather than alternative cable providers per se.

You bring up a very good point, but there are canon related issues when such a huge change to things are made. Playing Spartan-3s would be very appealing and interesting, but when put into context of the rest of the universe it becomes harder and harder to hide that many secret people. I would love to see it done correctly, but I have doubts that it will ever exsist due to market saturation and gameplay balancing. On the whole MMOs are moving to be more PvP based because PvP content creates itself if you give it a framework. It is cheaper and easier to balance PvP and code a place for it to happen than it is to create a never-ending series of quests. And with PvP making such an impact it seems very out of place for one group of Spartans to be fighting another, and if you make a Covenent equal to them you run face first into the canon/continuity wall again. And as a sidenote, I apologize for insinuating that most Halo players are mindless zombies. They are zombies that routinely wipe my bleeding crying ass all over "Pit" and "Guardian". :)