The link at the end of the video is to the Microsoft Research website, where they explain most of what you see in the video. The 'bubbles' talked about in TFS don't appear there though.

Full screen apps? Oh no! I hate when an application provides a nonstandard UI. The screen shot shows that even the menu bar is gone, which I find unacceptable for everything except media playback.

Autosave, Versions and Resume on the other hand are fantastic and long overdue. It'll be interesting to see how they implement Autosave: the easy way would be to save every x minutes, the right way would be to create a transaction log and save every action (keystroke, mouse gesture), to make sure that when you crash, every action up to the moment of the crash is preserved.

I think the figures you have for the Shuttle are low. Endeavor cost $ 1.7B to build from spare components. That does not include the cost to acquire those components, and it assumes the design has been paid for already.

From Wikipedia: Roger Pielke has estimated that the Space Shuttle program has cost about US$170 billion (2008 dollars) through early 2008. This works out to an average cost per flight of about US$1.5 billion.

What we see here is an attempt to maximise screen real estate. This is necessary on today's widescreen laptops and netbooks, but pointless for those who have a large monitor.
For this reason, the UI should be user-configurable.

You're right, it's not a "(rare earth) element". Unfortunately, journalists and other Muggles tend to use the term as "rare (earth element)", applying it to any element that's not abundant.

Finally, here we have a standardised way of attaching menu items to a web page. No more JS or Flash "menus" inside a page, but something that can be made to have a consistent look and feel, and something that can be scripted from the OS.
Until now we've had to make do with one macro language for the OS and its apps (QuicKeys) and another for use within the browser.
Bring it on!

Sure, if you have room for it that's the way to go. But there's a huge number of laptops out there that only have room for one drive.

What I want is a combination of a large-capacity spinning drive and an SSD in a single housing that's no larger than current 2,5" drives. The SSD should be large enough for the OS + frequently-used apps and data.

The Seagate Momentus XT sort of offers this, but it uses its SSD as a disk cache, so there's no way to influence what gets put on the SSD. And 4 GB is too small: my Hibernation file alone is 4 GB. Also, it has some weird auto-sleep features that make life difficult when you put it in a Mac.

What I want is one physical box (so it'll fit in a laptop) that exposes two separate volumes so I can decide for myself what to put where. 500 GB RD [1] + 32 GB SSD would be sufficient.

1: Rotating Disk, to allow us to talk about spinning rust drives with as much brevity as 'SSD'.

I want a plugin that intercepts HTML5 or Flash video and opens it in VLC instead of the browser window.

For Flash video, this means it'll get played in by a player that performs decently (instead of the crappy Flash video we get in OSX browsers). And it means I get a decent UI to control playback, with real controls that listen to keyboard input and whose preferences can be modified, instead of the pathetic mouse-only 'controls' offered by Flash video code.

Mains circuits are actually implemented as a ring in the UK? I.e. with both end points connected to the power supply? Interesting.
Over here (.nl) the electrical code specifies a star topology, to minimise the number of connections in the wiring.

Neither TFA nor the project website contain decent images of the actual paper airplanes. What design did they choose, and how did they find a design that would work this well?

The cellphone provider would have to fly in a tight circle to serve a small area on the ground (otherwise you'd lose connection). This makes it impractical to serve a large area (you'd need too many aircraft).

Wifi is even more difficult, since the range of standard wifi is not enough.

From TFS:

Apple has been talking about 'applications' in preference to 'programs' for decades. 'App' has been a common abbreviation in the Macintosh world for years.