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A L S O__T O D A Y Money for nothing By Scott Rosenberg "Burn Rate" captivatingly portrays a Net industry built on a con game -- but its author is playing, too Self-combustion By Alexander Cohen A veteran of the Internet's "gold rush" years takes a hard look at "Burn Rate" - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is Apple finally in the clear or does the threat of folding still loom large? Weigh in on the computer maker's fate in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Millennium bugging out By Janelle Brown Year 2000 survivalists, fearing digitally induced chaos, head for the hills (06/11/98) Site of a thousand dances By Janelle Brown At CDuctive, dance-music fans get to assemble their favorite tracks off wax (06/11/98) The software that refused to die By Greg Lindsay When the owner of mTropolis gave it the ax, users raised money to take the code into their own hands (06/10/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg First Microsoft, now Intel? Similarities between the two antitrust battles are all on the surface (06/09/98) Quake-r state By Andrew Leonard When online gamers rallied to defend a female player from harassment, they learned there's more to life than pixel gore (06/08/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST CHALLENGE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - _______

BY CHARLIE VARON AND JIM ROSENAU | Wisdom tends to be more durable when compressed into neat little packages. Proverbs are memorable -- even when they contradict each other (as in "Look before you leap" and "He who hesitates is lost"). In the tradition of "To err is human, to really screw up takes a computer," we invite readers to submit up to three pithy, original proverb updates for the digital era. - - - - - - - - - - - - E X A M P L E S A file saved is a megabyte burned. Browse before you leap. If a computer crashes in the forest and no one is there to reboot it, does it still save .bak files? Extremism in the defense of Macintosh is no vice. Don't switch versions in the middle of a project. My ISP, right or wrong. The watched system never boots. - - - - - - - - - - - - R U L E S Send your submissions via e-mail only to salon21st@salonmagazine.com. Please include your full name and an accurate e-mail address so we can contact you if you're a winner. By submitting your entry you give Salon permission to publish it. Deadline for entries is June 19, 1998. The winning response this round will receive a copy of Ellen Ullman's book, "Close to the Machine," winner of a Salon Book Award for 1997. In two weeks we'll publish a winner and some selected entries -- then start over a couple weeks after that with a whole new challenge. SALON | June 12, 1998 Charlie Varon is a humorist and playwright. His works include "Ralph Nader Is Missing" and "Rush Limbaugh in Night School." Jim Rosenau is a writer, editor and software designer in Berkeley, Calif. Jim and Charlie are also co-founders of the citizen group Californians for Earthquake Prevention and partners in Mockingbird Productions, which offers a full line of comic services.