It depends on whether your country has implemented the EU directive or not. We haven't here in the UK and we don't want to as our Sale of Goods Act rules are stronger than the EU directive in many ways. There is no such thing as a fixed guarantee - goods should last for a reasonably expected lifetime.

Of course you were....

There speaks someone too young to remember Windows 3.x. Compared to DOS/Windows 3.1x, Win9x was an absolute dream. Before Windows 95 there was no such thing as plug'n'play hardware. Certainly most of the people now building and upgrading PCs would not be doing it if things were the way they used to be because you had to know about IRQs, DMA and hardware memory addresses, what was already in use in the machine and how to manually configure system files to use the hardware. You were also limited to how much you could put in a machine because there was no such thing as IRQ sharing.

I don't see many college students typing up their homework on their iPhone.

SCC isn't law. It is a set of rules for the school.

I am actually from the East Riding. This was Hull Social Services, not the East Ridings. Hull is a separate local authority.

...apart from the spell checker you're using.

Looks at GCHQ listening post 20 miles away.....Yes, yes they are.

Average Joe isn't frightened at all, certainly not to this extent. Unfortunately there are morons in the civil service who need to justify their jobs and departments at Whitehall that need to protect their budgets so make cleverly worded proposals to members of the Cabinet who then propose such nonsense in the name of the "war on terror". I'm still trying to work out who we have to fear now the Islamic Fundalmentalist Bin Laden is no longer here and the gobshyte clerics such as Abu Hamsa and his mate Qtada are regarded as a bit of a joke by Average Joe.

Judging on how much time and money Apple are spending trying to block the sale of the Samsung Galaxy S2 it must be one hell of a good phone. One could almost deduce that Apple think its actually better than their iPhone 4S with the amount of attention they're giving it. Might be worth looking at the Galaxy S2......