Sorry, but I doubt that someone who hates a Mac has any clue about IT, operation systems and/or programming.
Oh, yeah. Naturally. I mean, without a Mac, how would you set up and maintain servers, develop for operating systems, and program!? I, too, without any supporting evidence because I also can't stand the hatred of what is clearly a superfluous, overpriced operating system, will claim that Mac haters are incompetent in those areas
Yeah, I was being sarcastic. It's fine if you really like the UI and willing to pay the extra money for something that can clearly be done for cheaper, but it's really dumb to make such claims. There really isn't any reason why people in IT, OS developers, and programmers can't hate Macs. They may need to use them for their jobs, but there's no reason why they still can't hate them.
You can't take heroin during a work break, mainly because you wouldn't be able to return. Smoking relieves stress for various circumstances, while also stimulating you, so it not only provides temporarily relief, it also provides motivation to do a specific task.
I have similar objections to the USDA prohibiting farmers for doing 100% screening and labeling their meat as salmonella free. Apparently that would make other farms look bad and since all the meat is safe it isn't necessary so why should consumers have that choice?
Wouldn't that give people a false sense of security? Salmonella contamination can happen at any stage of meat processing. It is probably most frequent at the site of meat packaging, like a butcher shop or something.
I really don't understand any of you. There is so much arguing coming from the resident Libertarians, and I really cannot make sense of it. The definition for a natural right is weak, it's just a thing we all want because the vast majority of us aren't wealthy enough to purchase those rights, rights like free speech. Free speech isn't essential to life, and therefore having it as a right serves no purpose other than convincing others that someone has screwed you. Property? That is even more arbitrary, because at least speech is something that emanates from within you at no cost to anyone else, but property wasn't a thing that was dealt out to the first humans on the earth, and then bought and sold. There is no objective way to discover something and claim it's yours. Do you have a right to something if you discovered it, and anything visible to your eyes are immediately yours if not viewed by any other humans? Why?
Natural rights don't really exist. The truest natural right would be might makes right. If you're gifted at war and collaboration to the point where you control an empire, then you earned your rights. What we call natural rights benefit most people, so we generally agree they're a good thing that needs protection. Yeah, you're taking my money so police can help you protect your property, but I need that, too, so that's fine. If I was wealthy enough, I could fund my own protection, like well trained security guards, so my dollar would go to help poor people protect themselves. Isn't this what Libertarians call theft? If the redistribution of wealth is okay to protect other people's lives and property, then why isn't it okay to educate the masses, give them good healthcare, and give them information via internet? I'm sure there is, at least, one person in this entire world who doesn't care about law enforcement, and you're taking that person's right away by stealing money from him so that your property is protected.
Natural rights is supposed to protect us from the corruption of two major powers: the government and large corporations. They both play such a large role in our lives, and giving either too much power can mean too many restrictions. Some people are aware that too much authority given to the government can be abused, and some are aware that too little regulation on corporations results in much of the same. What is absolutely shocking is that these same people who make some great arguments for their beliefs fail to see how those same arguments apply to that other major power! We should fear both the government and corporations, and we should actually make sure that we regulate both: we the people regulate the government, and the government, regulated by we the people, should then regulate the corporations. In the end, I never want anyone to ever hinder me from getting an education. The internet makes educating oneself largely free, and everyone should have some sort of access to it.
With the flood of PhDs in the market, nobody is going to want you to do any actual research without a PhD. With a Master's you can be a glorified lab tech, database manager, programmer, whatever, but even if you're way more than qualified, they won't let you do any significant research without a PhD.
Your best bet is to join a PhD program, deal with the significant decrease in income for five years, then get into the career you want. The more you wait and older you get, the harder it will be to take such action.
Tests and anti-cheating measures are the lazy way to go about "education". But what do you expect when the most egregious cheaters, plagiarizers, and bullshitters are the professors themselves?
Some of this might be fine if all you do is teach, but many professors do research, and for those professor who have yet to obtain tenure, many of these suggestions you've made are unrealistic. Not to mention that none of your examples have anything to do with professors plagiarizing, bullshitting, and cheating. Also, some of your complaints have nothing to do with professors at all.
Write your own lectures.
Write your own tests and assignments.
Change them every year.
Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Most professors usually write their own lectures. I've only had one professor who recycled lectures from another professor, and he ended getting fired for failing too many students. He also wasn't there to do research, either. I don't see how this is a problem--especially if you're writing your own exams based off the lecture material. Changing exams every year is a lot of work. Writing a fair exam is hard, especially if it's been a long time since you first learned the material. It's doable, and definitely more realistic than writing new exams every semester. Eventually this will slow down, because there is so many ways you can rewrite exams without making similar questions to previous exams or unfair exams. One professor of mine had the students write the exams and gave bonus points to those who wrote questions he felt good to be on an exam. I found those exams more difficult than usual.
Don't copy them from the campus where your other professor friend works.
Don't pull shit out of the book you wrote for the class and made students buy.
Don't make students buy the book of your cohort^h^h^h^h^h^h colleague on another campus and have him reciprocate the favor, only for both of you to teach to your opinions and not what's in the assigned material.
I've never had a problem with buying a textbook my professor wrote. That happened once, and the textbook was cheap as well and did better than equivalents costing over 100 dollars more.
Get TAs that speak English.
TAs are just grad students who need funding to survive. Teaching positions are in greater numbers, and there are many grad students who are still struggling with English having just came over to do a graduate degree. Fortunately, TAs rarely teach major lectures. If you're taking a lab, you shouldn't be relying on the TA to teach you the material--only to present it in a way so you know what to expect for a lab or an exam.
Speak English.
In the sciences, professors get hired based on their research credentials. Having an amazing teacher doesn't bring in the big bucks, but someone who can bring in amazing grant money, publish in amazing journals, and pass grad students can.
Respond to emails.
I agree with this one.
Update your website.
Unless you're required to go to a website for some sort of class project or whatever, I don't understand this suggestion.
Post notes and assignments when you say you will.
Agreed
Hold more than 1 office hour per week.
This is a waste of time if you do active research. Most of my professors I've had were willing to set aside time if you couldn't make it to office hours or if the office hour wasn't enough. More often than not, professors end up sitting in their offices alone during that hour--as some of mine have complained. I'm a TA for a lab, and unless one of their homework assignments requires to make a graph in Excel, I'm usually pretty lonely during my office hours.
Understand the material yourself
I haven't had too much
Re:yea, this is clear, but what about....
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
I don't know how this got 5+ interesting.
A research professor is an expert in the field in acquires the money for a project by pitching a sale. Those who do the actual labor not only obtain money for it, either by a research assistantship (ideal) or teacher assistantship (less than ideal except for the valuable teaching experience), but also receive credit by getting first author on the publications they primarily worked on. The advisor is typically the last author on the paper. When buying an essay, the original writers get zero credit. If any credit is given for the essay writer, the essay is worthless to the student.
The argument isn't that random processes prove that a designer doesn't exist, but rather proves that a designer isn't necessary to have design.
Basically, the default stance is, "There probably isn't a god because of the lack of evidence supporting the hypothesis." Creationists use, "all things designed that we know of have designers, therefore we have been designed by a designer." Dawkins and Hawkings embraced random chance in the ability to make things that appear designed, effectively shooting down that argument as evidence to support the existence of a designer.
I meant to scroll down and accidentally modded your post flamebait--I didn't even get to read it! Anyway, posting to cancel out inappropriate mod points
I try to avoid USPS when purchasing merchandise online. There was one website that only offered USPS, and I purchased a product through them twice. The first time around, the product took about a week and a half to arrive to my home when the estimated time was 3 business days.
I ordered a second time. I was hesitant, but I figured a little bit of extra waiting wouldn't kill me, and I wanted an additional product from that site. I waited the three business days and nothing came--I wasn't surprised. So I waited s'more, and I decided to check the useless tracking feature USPS has to see if there were any updates. Turns out my item was already delivered...the day before I checked the tracking. It never arrived in my mailbox, but it said it was sent. I filed a complaint and was assured by the mail lady that when something is scanned in, it means it was put in the right mailbox. She claimed that it could've been a kid who stole it out of the box. I was pissed, and I felt like I was robbed. A week later, my brother checks the mail right after the mail lady delivered, and lo and behold, there is my package. What the fuck happened!? Where the hell was it? Was it put in the wrong box and someone had the decency to put it back in the box so it gets delivered to the right address? Was someone a little careless with the scanner? I was glad I received the merchandise, but I took this as my second warning. I won't use USPS again, because the third time I may not be so lucky.
The debate was philosophical at the heart of it, because at the root of the debate was the problem of nature vs nurture. Many happy about the discovery were using it ease their fear that human behavior could be traced to genes.
None of what was mentioned in the article is even new to biologists, or at least geneticists. This stuff is taught in a general genetics course, suggesting that this has been accepted for years prior.
"Junk DNA" probably hasn't been stated in any serious, meaningful way by genetics in decades, and probably was never meant to be taken seriously--especially since research in gene expression took off. Not to say that there aren't any junk DNA, there certainly are, but the media took something interesting and blew it out of proportion like they always do. The real clue was how some supposedly junk DNA was very conserved, and the fact that you'd think that a genome full of junk would eventually get smaller and smaller with time considering the amount of energy it takes to replicate and package such a load. To think that geneticists simply thought it was all useless junk flies in the face of logic.
In the state of Florida, 16 is old enough to drive. 16 is not old enough to go to war, to own a weapon, and to vote, but somehow they're old enough to drive a weapon?
This idea is great. 16 year olds tend to be too aggressive at the wheel, and while many have responsibilities that require them to drive, they should not be given absolute freedom on the road.
I've been driving since I was 18, and in the five years I've been driving, I've never had a reason to exceed 80 mph.
I got Bs in Orgo 1 and 2, and maybe if I actually worked through the practice problems in the book, I could have achieved As. More realistically, I wish they gave more than 50 minutes to take an exam, as organic chemistry tests are the kind of tests where answers materialize only when you have a few minutes left. Nothing is more frustrating when you realize that most of the points taken off were due to careless mistakes that could've been corrected if I had even just ten more minutes to proofread.
Regardless, I really didn't put in a substantial amount of effort and I achieved Bs. Many premed students struggled very hard and I never really understood why. The only memorization necessary was the reagents, but many of the reagents were taught with their mechanisms. By seeing the flow of electrons, things made sense. After awhile, you just started seeing patterns. My strategy was simply rewriting my notes from class a few times.
Premeds frustrate me. Many of them achieve excellent grades but don't appear to retain the information they've learned. I've also noticed a cheating culture among them. The problem isn't with forcing organic chemistry on the poor premeds, the problem is that tests aren't great indications of knowledge. Classes exist mainly to weed out the more dimwitted types. Other methods of weeding out are: letters of recommendation, standardized tests, and lab experience, with the letters and lab experience being the most important and realistic measures of intelligence and competence.
If something is unpredictable, then it simply means it's unable to be predicted. If something is truly unpredictable, then it doesn't show a clear pattern. Humans show clear patterns, meaning we don't have free will? Well, that doesn't quite settle the debate, it just means that a faulty definition of free is being used.
Something that is truly random cannot also be controlled. So while we may perform actions that could truly be random without a cause, those actions are not due to our will. The action is free from causation, but it isn't a result of our will, either.
I argue that there is no such thing as free will, and I argue this because we can't even define what free will is without arguing about it. How can we choose our actions freely? We're created by a collaboration of our genes and environment. The fact that both our genes and environment influence behavior probably means that they create it. There isn't an individual that grew up in a particular environment has happens to have genes, individuals are the products of its genes and environment, period.
Don't all 'higher' animals begin life essentially as a parasite within the mother? Now granted, its the same species in this scenario, but it's still something to think about.
A living individual animal only lasts for X amount of years. The level of importance is down to the gene, not really at the individual, but the individual will try to spread as much of its genes as it can to the next generation. This is a lot harder to do with females than with males, because females are typically stuck with the job of raising the kid, costing both resources and energy.
The fetus under development is not a parasite, because the benefit of the host is to pass on its genes to yet another generation.
What about fungi? They are considered organisms and alive, yet they grow as a parasite in or on a living host or other form of organic matter, and cannot grow or reproduce without said host. That's not too far off from how a virus reproduces. True, fungal reproduction does begin within the cells of the fungus itself, but the line really isn't as clear as many would think.
We all need some kind of resources to survive, but we have replicating machinery that viruses do not. Fungi have this replicating machinery, and much of what is understood about the replication machinery in eukaryotes comes from the S. cerevisiae, a fungi. It doesn't matter if an organisms is living on a host to leech off of some of the host's resources such as nutrients. We all get our nutrients externally. Viruses can't even replicate without hijacking the machinery of another organism. That's really neat, but that doesn't quite make them alive.
On that note, no life form truly reproduces autonomously; the chemicals that life is formed of are created/encoded from outside materials. Animals take in these outside materials by eating, plants draw them from the ground, fungi from the aforementioned host/organic matter.
That said, It is true that when viruses replicate, the 'parent' virus does not take in material to reproduce (and rather, as mentioned, hijacks the host cells systems to do so). As important as that distinction may sound, I believe that when compared to how 'true' life forms reproduce, it seems mainly a question of semantics. It's a tough call, I guess all that can be said is that viruses certainly define the term 'gray area...'
It's not really an issue of semantics if you consider how important it is for an organism to be able to replicate itself. It's one of the basic things of being alive, probably the most basic.
That's pretty much why viruses aren't considered alive, as they only propagate by hijacking living organisms' replication machinery.
Eunuchs are individuals, that the definition of life applies to species, not individuals.
Mules can occasionally reproduce, but is rare and it's due to the unequal distribution of chromosomes in meiosis. This isn't why they would be consider alive, they are the offspring of organisms that are alive. It's just an anomaly of nature. All viruses are parasites that depend on a host's replicating machinery by definition, therefore cannot be considered living.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't take heroin during a work break, mainly because you wouldn't be able to return. Smoking relieves stress for various circumstances, while also stimulating you, so it not only provides temporarily relief, it also provides motivation to do a specific task.
I have similar objections to the USDA prohibiting farmers for doing 100% screening and labeling their meat as salmonella free. Apparently that would make other farms look bad and since all the meat is safe it isn't necessary so why should consumers have that choice?
Wouldn't that give people a false sense of security? Salmonella contamination can happen at any stage of meat processing. It is probably most frequent at the site of meat packaging, like a butcher shop or something.
I really don't understand any of you. There is so much arguing coming from the resident Libertarians, and I really cannot make sense of it. The definition for a natural right is weak, it's just a thing we all want because the vast majority of us aren't wealthy enough to purchase those rights, rights like free speech. Free speech isn't essential to life, and therefore having it as a right serves no purpose other than convincing others that someone has screwed you. Property? That is even more arbitrary, because at least speech is something that emanates from within you at no cost to anyone else, but property wasn't a thing that was dealt out to the first humans on the earth, and then bought and sold. There is no objective way to discover something and claim it's yours. Do you have a right to something if you discovered it, and anything visible to your eyes are immediately yours if not viewed by any other humans? Why?
Natural rights don't really exist. The truest natural right would be might makes right. If you're gifted at war and collaboration to the point where you control an empire, then you earned your rights. What we call natural rights benefit most people, so we generally agree they're a good thing that needs protection. Yeah, you're taking my money so police can help you protect your property, but I need that, too, so that's fine. If I was wealthy enough, I could fund my own protection, like well trained security guards, so my dollar would go to help poor people protect themselves. Isn't this what Libertarians call theft? If the redistribution of wealth is okay to protect other people's lives and property, then why isn't it okay to educate the masses, give them good healthcare, and give them information via internet? I'm sure there is, at least, one person in this entire world who doesn't care about law enforcement, and you're taking that person's right away by stealing money from him so that your property is protected.
Natural rights is supposed to protect us from the corruption of two major powers: the government and large corporations. They both play such a large role in our lives, and giving either too much power can mean too many restrictions. Some people are aware that too much authority given to the government can be abused, and some are aware that too little regulation on corporations results in much of the same. What is absolutely shocking is that these same people who make some great arguments for their beliefs fail to see how those same arguments apply to that other major power! We should fear both the government and corporations, and we should actually make sure that we regulate both: we the people regulate the government, and the government, regulated by we the people, should then regulate the corporations. In the end, I never want anyone to ever hinder me from getting an education. The internet makes educating oneself largely free, and everyone should have some sort of access to it.
Congress has the power to write the checks, however, the president has the power to void them.
If this can be generalized to adults, then I am going to break a world texting record!
Life is going to be a lot harder for those poor vegetarians
Yes, it's clear that special cases require special treatment.
"Ironically Matt Smith, the youngest Doctor Who ever, apparently wants to retire early"
Irony... I don't think it means what you think it means.
Science grad schools don't take a dime from you. You're either have a generous RA stipend or TA stipend.
With the flood of PhDs in the market, nobody is going to want you to do any actual research without a PhD. With a Master's you can be a glorified lab tech, database manager, programmer, whatever, but even if you're way more than qualified, they won't let you do any significant research without a PhD.
Your best bet is to join a PhD program, deal with the significant decrease in income for five years, then get into the career you want. The more you wait and older you get, the harder it will be to take such action.
USF >>>>>> UCF
Tests and anti-cheating measures are the lazy way to go about "education". But what do you expect when the most egregious cheaters, plagiarizers, and bullshitters are the professors themselves?
Some of this might be fine if all you do is teach, but many professors do research, and for those professor who have yet to obtain tenure, many of these suggestions you've made are unrealistic. Not to mention that none of your examples have anything to do with professors plagiarizing, bullshitting, and cheating. Also, some of your complaints have nothing to do with professors at all.
Write your own lectures. Write your own tests and assignments. Change them every year. Change them if you have multiple testing sessions.
Most professors usually write their own lectures. I've only had one professor who recycled lectures from another professor, and he ended getting fired for failing too many students. He also wasn't there to do research, either. I don't see how this is a problem--especially if you're writing your own exams based off the lecture material. Changing exams every year is a lot of work. Writing a fair exam is hard, especially if it's been a long time since you first learned the material. It's doable, and definitely more realistic than writing new exams every semester. Eventually this will slow down, because there is so many ways you can rewrite exams without making similar questions to previous exams or unfair exams. One professor of mine had the students write the exams and gave bonus points to those who wrote questions he felt good to be on an exam. I found those exams more difficult than usual.
Don't copy them from the campus where your other professor friend works. Don't pull shit out of the book you wrote for the class and made students buy. Don't make students buy the book of your cohort^h^h^h^h^h^h colleague on another campus and have him reciprocate the favor, only for both of you to teach to your opinions and not what's in the assigned material.
I've never had a problem with buying a textbook my professor wrote. That happened once, and the textbook was cheap as well and did better than equivalents costing over 100 dollars more.
Get TAs that speak English.
TAs are just grad students who need funding to survive. Teaching positions are in greater numbers, and there are many grad students who are still struggling with English having just came over to do a graduate degree. Fortunately, TAs rarely teach major lectures. If you're taking a lab, you shouldn't be relying on the TA to teach you the material--only to present it in a way so you know what to expect for a lab or an exam.
Speak English.
In the sciences, professors get hired based on their research credentials. Having an amazing teacher doesn't bring in the big bucks, but someone who can bring in amazing grant money, publish in amazing journals, and pass grad students can.
Respond to emails.
I agree with this one.
Update your website.
Unless you're required to go to a website for some sort of class project or whatever, I don't understand this suggestion.
Post notes and assignments when you say you will.
Agreed
Hold more than 1 office hour per week.
This is a waste of time if you do active research. Most of my professors I've had were willing to set aside time if you couldn't make it to office hours or if the office hour wasn't enough. More often than not, professors end up sitting in their offices alone during that hour--as some of mine have complained. I'm a TA for a lab, and unless one of their homework assignments requires to make a graph in Excel, I'm usually pretty lonely during my office hours.
Understand the material yourself
I haven't had too much
A research professor is an expert in the field in acquires the money for a project by pitching a sale. Those who do the actual labor not only obtain money for it, either by a research assistantship (ideal) or teacher assistantship (less than ideal except for the valuable teaching experience), but also receive credit by getting first author on the publications they primarily worked on. The advisor is typically the last author on the paper. When buying an essay, the original writers get zero credit. If any credit is given for the essay writer, the essay is worthless to the student.
The argument isn't that random processes prove that a designer doesn't exist, but rather proves that a designer isn't necessary to have design.
Basically, the default stance is, "There probably isn't a god because of the lack of evidence supporting the hypothesis." Creationists use, "all things designed that we know of have designers, therefore we have been designed by a designer." Dawkins and Hawkings embraced random chance in the ability to make things that appear designed, effectively shooting down that argument as evidence to support the existence of a designer.
I meant to scroll down and accidentally modded your post flamebait--I didn't even get to read it! Anyway, posting to cancel out inappropriate mod points
I try to avoid USPS when purchasing merchandise online. There was one website that only offered USPS, and I purchased a product through them twice. The first time around, the product took about a week and a half to arrive to my home when the estimated time was 3 business days.
I ordered a second time. I was hesitant, but I figured a little bit of extra waiting wouldn't kill me, and I wanted an additional product from that site. I waited the three business days and nothing came--I wasn't surprised. So I waited s'more, and I decided to check the useless tracking feature USPS has to see if there were any updates. Turns out my item was already delivered...the day before I checked the tracking. It never arrived in my mailbox, but it said it was sent. I filed a complaint and was assured by the mail lady that when something is scanned in, it means it was put in the right mailbox. She claimed that it could've been a kid who stole it out of the box. I was pissed, and I felt like I was robbed. A week later, my brother checks the mail right after the mail lady delivered, and lo and behold, there is my package. What the fuck happened!? Where the hell was it? Was it put in the wrong box and someone had the decency to put it back in the box so it gets delivered to the right address? Was someone a little careless with the scanner? I was glad I received the merchandise, but I took this as my second warning. I won't use USPS again, because the third time I may not be so lucky.
The debate was philosophical at the heart of it, because at the root of the debate was the problem of nature vs nurture. Many happy about the discovery were using it ease their fear that human behavior could be traced to genes.
None of what was mentioned in the article is even new to biologists, or at least geneticists. This stuff is taught in a general genetics course, suggesting that this has been accepted for years prior.
"Junk DNA" probably hasn't been stated in any serious, meaningful way by genetics in decades, and probably was never meant to be taken seriously--especially since research in gene expression took off. Not to say that there aren't any junk DNA, there certainly are, but the media took something interesting and blew it out of proportion like they always do. The real clue was how some supposedly junk DNA was very conserved, and the fact that you'd think that a genome full of junk would eventually get smaller and smaller with time considering the amount of energy it takes to replicate and package such a load. To think that geneticists simply thought it was all useless junk flies in the face of logic.
This idea is great. 16 year olds tend to be too aggressive at the wheel, and while many have responsibilities that require them to drive, they should not be given absolute freedom on the road.
I've been driving since I was 18, and in the five years I've been driving, I've never had a reason to exceed 80 mph.
Regardless, I really didn't put in a substantial amount of effort and I achieved Bs. Many premed students struggled very hard and I never really understood why. The only memorization necessary was the reagents, but many of the reagents were taught with their mechanisms. By seeing the flow of electrons, things made sense. After awhile, you just started seeing patterns. My strategy was simply rewriting my notes from class a few times.
Premeds frustrate me. Many of them achieve excellent grades but don't appear to retain the information they've learned. I've also noticed a cheating culture among them. The problem isn't with forcing organic chemistry on the poor premeds, the problem is that tests aren't great indications of knowledge. Classes exist mainly to weed out the more dimwitted types. Other methods of weeding out are: letters of recommendation, standardized tests, and lab experience, with the letters and lab experience being the most important and realistic measures of intelligence and competence.
Something that is truly random cannot also be controlled. So while we may perform actions that could truly be random without a cause, those actions are not due to our will. The action is free from causation, but it isn't a result of our will, either.
I argue that there is no such thing as free will, and I argue this because we can't even define what free will is without arguing about it. How can we choose our actions freely? We're created by a collaboration of our genes and environment. The fact that both our genes and environment influence behavior probably means that they create it. There isn't an individual that grew up in a particular environment has happens to have genes, individuals are the products of its genes and environment, period.
Don't all 'higher' animals begin life essentially as a parasite within the mother? Now granted, its the same species in this scenario, but it's still something to think about.
A living individual animal only lasts for X amount of years. The level of importance is down to the gene, not really at the individual, but the individual will try to spread as much of its genes as it can to the next generation. This is a lot harder to do with females than with males, because females are typically stuck with the job of raising the kid, costing both resources and energy.
The fetus under development is not a parasite, because the benefit of the host is to pass on its genes to yet another generation.
What about fungi? They are considered organisms and alive, yet they grow as a parasite in or on a living host or other form of organic matter, and cannot grow or reproduce without said host. That's not too far off from how a virus reproduces. True, fungal reproduction does begin within the cells of the fungus itself, but the line really isn't as clear as many would think.
We all need some kind of resources to survive, but we have replicating machinery that viruses do not. Fungi have this replicating machinery, and much of what is understood about the replication machinery in eukaryotes comes from the S. cerevisiae, a fungi. It doesn't matter if an organisms is living on a host to leech off of some of the host's resources such as nutrients. We all get our nutrients externally. Viruses can't even replicate without hijacking the machinery of another organism. That's really neat, but that doesn't quite make them alive.
On that note, no life form truly reproduces autonomously; the chemicals that life is formed of are created/encoded from outside materials. Animals take in these outside materials by eating, plants draw them from the ground, fungi from the aforementioned host/organic matter.
That said, It is true that when viruses replicate, the 'parent' virus does not take in material to reproduce (and rather, as mentioned, hijacks the host cells systems to do so). As important as that distinction may sound, I believe that when compared to how 'true' life forms reproduce, it seems mainly a question of semantics. It's a tough call, I guess all that can be said is that viruses certainly define the term 'gray area...'
It's not really an issue of semantics if you consider how important it is for an organism to be able to replicate itself. It's one of the basic things of being alive, probably the most basic.
That's pretty much why viruses aren't considered alive, as they only propagate by hijacking living organisms' replication machinery. Eunuchs are individuals, that the definition of life applies to species, not individuals. Mules can occasionally reproduce, but is rare and it's due to the unequal distribution of chromosomes in meiosis. This isn't why they would be consider alive, they are the offspring of organisms that are alive. It's just an anomaly of nature. All viruses are parasites that depend on a host's replicating machinery by definition, therefore cannot be considered living.
Um, isn't it a little late for an April Fool's gag?