There are reasons to fly "more than half way" - in air refuelling assets, staying close to airports and so on.

Just as Elon Musk said, to put a pound of payload into orbit you use about the same fuel as to fly that payload around the globe. The difference is in the costs of the plane versus costs of the rockets.

It goes to space based on the current understanding of the atmosphere highest limit (above that is space). The edge of space is conventionally at 100 km (or 62 miles).
      It is true, the velocity of the Space Ship 2 at that altitude is negligible - and it would need some 6+ km/s (I think), or more than four miles a second to stay in orbit.
      So, in the end, it's just a novelty thing. Just like the first flights of the Wright brothers (and other pioneers in aviation) were tens of feets (and altitudes reached were in the tens of inches), figuratively landing in the same place where their flight started

The American Fifth Amendment you say? Why would the UK care about that, when it's an issue between a British citizen living in UK, and the UK police?

Frankly, there was a time when motherboard reviews from Anandtech presented the number of times the board crashed during testing. It then went lower and lower, then they only crashed when using interleaved memory banks, then they didn't crash at all during normal use.
      Or maybe the crashes weren't reported any longer.

Not to mention power needed. What use is a human powered airplane that needs the power level of an athlete, while it would expect a small total load? What do you do against a front wind? While winds of 25 km/h are not common, winds of 12 km/h are quite common (and would double your flight time when going against them).
      Also, this airplane seems to use more parking space than a couple of cars

Maybe because it was an university project? Plenty less interesting things were done as university projects.
      What I don't like is that, while presented as an "flapping wing aircraft", this seems a fixed wing aircraft with a "flapping propeller" instead of a rotating one.

There is the issue of the car in front not braking, but catastrophically stopping (hitting a downed tree, or a stopped truck, or something). That makes you unable to stop if your speed is high enough, even if you're 6 seconds behind him (which, at 60 mph is about 500 feet - or 100 km/h and 160 meters)

Intel has enough money to buy AMD several times over - but buying something like nVidia (or AMD, or VIA for that matter) might be veto-ed by the Federal Trade Comission (for anti competitive reasons)

Tell that to the first world war, second world war, famines, plagues, mongols and so on.