Pose mode and GRS all give me a scale cursor that doesn't do any thing I'm currently following a tutorial to rig a character.

All goes well until I go to Pose Mode to see if my rig moves (I can do that before or after doing the automatic weight things, it changes nothing).



What happens is most strange: I select a bone and press G. The usual box with the colour arrows appear, I try to grab and move one of them and it turns into a >&lt; like that. 



So far I've only seen that whilst scaling in edit mode and it does nothing, same with rotating. 
I verified I do not have any lock on location or rotation for the chosen bone or it's neighbours. I also dont have the ctrl + . or snap to center turned on, I checked all I could in the manual and here and found nothing.
I've spent the afternoon on this and it's driving me nuts.
I haven't found anywhere on the net anyone who talked about a dead scale >&lt; cursor dragging and replacing the wheel and grab and scale box.

I am following the free rig the biker tutorial on Digital Tutors and so far so good, I checked everything. I'm nearing nervous breakdown.
Judging from your second screenshot, I'd suppose you've got Manipulate Center Points activated. While this is useful on multiple selected objects or bones, when bones are not connected, it leads to the behavior you describe in your Question. See the GIF below on how to deactivate this feature:



The purpose of this feature is to Translate objects by using Rotate or Scale functions. In your case, as the bone is already a child of another bone, Translation channels are automatically locked already. That's why nothing happens.