Are Viri (viruses?) Alive?

My 2 cents...The whole argument about what is "alive" and what is "non-alive" is too arbitrary to be at all fruitful, IMHO.AFAICS, the property of "life" is something we ascribe to certain organizations of matter that exhibit a certain class of behavior. The important thing to understand, though, is that HUMANS define this class of behavior. It is very much analagous to the property of color. We arbitrarily say that frequency range X is "red" and frequency rage Y is "yellow," and frequencies out side these ranges are "non-red" and "non-yellow." Yet there are no signs anywhere on the light spectrum that divide it so neatly for us. We just postulate the definitions according to an aribtrarily specified range. We even slice and dice within the color ranges to get more refined yet equally arbitrary colors like "Fire Engine Red" or "Candy Apple Red" or "Brick Red."So, similarly, there is nothing about "life" that objectively distinguishes itself from "non-life." The distinction exists in our minds only. This is not to say that the distinction is totally meaningless, but I don't believe that there is some ethereal "vitality" that is inherent in some clusters of matter and not in others that makes some things "alive" and others not.This is quite advantageous to keep in mind when considering theories of abiogenesis. In this light, it's not so much that we're looking for a point in history where life was "inserted" into matter, but rather where clusters of matter which are already part of a universe in motion and transition happened to begin exhibiting the behaviors we presently and arbitrarily define as "life."