Fast international money transfer is something that is already handled very well for those that truly need it. I know for a fact that the european central bank handles large volume transactions in a matter of seconds if not less. There is really no reason why traditional banks could not offer significantly shorter processing times for the majority of their services, it is just not in their interest to do so.
Interest is the keyword here. Banks collect it on their customers' money while they declare it to be 'in-flight'. This is the main reason why transactions that should take seconds are still deliberately delayed for days.
I remember when I first switched to kde 4.0 and everything slowed to a crawl because some background process (nepomuk) thought it was a good idea to index the whole filesystem.
I think people solve universal login without any service fairly successfully. They use the same email as account name and the same password on every service. There is really no need to have some external provider that manages "universal login" however convenient this might be for advertising and marketing purposes.
In principle you can add full colors, image capabilities and direct manipulation of objects to a shell, see for example IPython (the Qt-shell) or Mathematica. Ultimately any large enough GUI application will add scripting support, take autocad for example. There are arguably tons of simple applications that are simpler to use if implemented as command line tools, for example video/audio conversion, archival tools
>In principle you can add full colors, image capabilities and direct manipulation of objects to a shell, see for example IPython (the Qt-shell) or Mathematica.
Sure, but I'd call those GUI apps.
A GUI app can have textual command input, as it just needs a text entry widget to do so, but a CLI command can not have graphical elements -- since with CLI most people (including me) mean stuff that runs in a terminal, either with command line input or with some curses library.
In my eyes it is unfortunate that the terminal standard we are stuck with is dictated by a device designed in the 70s (vt100). There have been more advanced terminals, that had support for graphics and so on.
