Google added "click to buy" links to select videos on YouTube this morning, offering links for purchasing Amazon MP3s or iTunes tracks from music videos, or video games from their trailer clips. It's not the first, but it's one of the service's more direct attempts to justify YouTube's $1.65 billion purchase price and monetise the service. Which begs the question: What's the tipping point for users of the easy-to-watch, easy-to-embed service? Would you be willing to watch pre-play, post-play, or mid-clip advertisements, a la Hulu? Or would anything more than a few display ads along the side move you somewhere else? Let's hear your take on the boundaries of an appealing video service in the comments.

Freelancing has become a common way of working in the last decade, and is likely to achieve even greater prominence as companies seek ways to cut staff costs during economic turmoil. One of the basic decisions a freelancer has to make is whether to work as a sole trader, or incorporate themselves as a company. The latter offers some tax advantages, and can help secure your assets if the business gets into difficulties, but involves a lot more paperwork and can seem like overkill. While you should always get individual advice from an accountant, we'd like to know which route Lifehacker readers have taken when they've gone the freelance route. Share your experiences in the comments.

A number of blogs and web zines lately have examined Apple's App Store and its development policies and voiced their complaints. Chief among them are the app approvers' inconsistent approval standards—ranking the "Pull My Finger" app as not useful, for example, but allowing virtual bubble-wrap poppers—and taking a hard stance against any app that tries to upgrade or replace the built-in tools on an iPhone or iPod touch, like native podcast downloading or feature-added email clients. App Store developers knew Apple's policies from the start, of course, but many are calling for the Cupertino cool-maker to drop the secrecy and allow in competing apps. We're wondering what our iPhone/iPod touch app fans think—are you glad Apple's trying to keep an eye on the store, so to speak, or do you feel like you're missing out on potentially killer apps? Tell us your take on the store and its ground rules in the comments.

Essential time management yields increased success and productivity, according to weblog QuickSprout. By eliminating distractions, getting enough sleep (especially power napping), and maintaining a balanced diet, you can maximize your productivity and get more done in the few hours you have available. One productivity killer is beating around the bush.

Tell people what's on your mind—being honest and to the point is a great way to accomplish things quicker. When you beat around the bush things don't get accomplished as fast. Just think about boardroom meetings, people are hesitant to say what is on their mind, which causes meetings to drag on forever.

In other words, be direct and hope that your boss won't spend precious meeting time criticizing the feedback. What are your biggest time saving tips, and how do you make time to save time? Share your tips in the comments.

Software or webapps in a "beta" phase should, according to tradition, not pick up any major features, and should be going through community testing mostly to work out kinks and bugs. But one astute writer at the Pingdom blog found that 22 of Google's 49 public products—a good 45 percent—were listed as "beta," despite going through significant feature changes and even entire version changes. They're hardly alone, as other webapp companies, like Jott, have taken to developing entire applications under the beta flag. Some suggest Google may be avoiding providing tech support or owning up to any major flaws found in their products, but we're wondering: Do you see the definition of "beta" changing elsewhere? Are you happy with the idea of getting early access to potentially flawed products, or would you rather just get a working package when it's ready? Tell us your take in the comments.

Popular author Stephenie Meyer put her eagerly-anticipated vampire genre sequel Twilight Sun on indefinite hold after copies of her rough draft showed up on BitTorrent sites. The (obviously somewhat biased) TorrentFreak takes authors to task for not using online leaks as a promotional tool, but I have to ask: Would having access to a digital copy of a nearly-complete book inspire you to purchase the ink-and-paper version? Would having an advanced ebook reader, like the increasingly popular Kindle, change your answer? Let's hear both sides in the comments.

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Less than 24 hours after the premiere of popular TV show Prison Break, P2P file sharers downloaded the episode close to one million times—even though you can watch the show for free, online, at Hulu and Fox.com. Why is this? Wired writer Betsy Schiffman argues it's because file-sharing is habitual and convenient.

The fact that one million people downloaded the show within 24 hours—a little less than one-sixth of the 6.5 million people who watched Prison Break on TV on Monday night—proves, though, that P2P isn't going away just because there are legal alternatives now. "This is a group of people who define themselves in part by the technology they use and the application of that technology," says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research. "Chances are that this is only happening in a defined age group. You'd be hard-pressed to find 60 year-old guys passing this stuff off to their buddies."

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Technologist and well-read fellow Kevin Kelly lists the books that have changed his life. Life-changing books are not just your favourite books, he explains, but "books that altered your behaviour, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers." His list is a great one, and has at least one overlap with my own (Leaves of Grass, baby—English majors, unite!). Other books he lists include Gandhi's autobiography, the Bible, and The Fountainhead. What books have been levers for you, and changed your life and way of thinking? Please share in the comments, so we can all load up our libraries. br />

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The writers at Macworld are going over to the dark side and listing all the Windows applications that make them want to dual boot or virtualise Windows on their Intel Macs. The main package that makes Windows-on-a-Mac worth it? Microsoft Office 2007, simply because it includes Outlook and Access, both Windows-only packages. (Yes, Office 2008 for Mac includes Entourage, but Entourage can't do everything Outlook can.) Likewise, some of the other Office on Windows programs have features MS Office on Mac does not—like Word's handy revision tracking. Other applications on the list include IE 7 (for web site testing), Windows Media Player 11, Visio, and Netflix. Oddly, Macworld didn't mention the one program I absolutely pine for when I'm booted into OS X.

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You just sat down at the internet café, you've got your coffee, your scone, and your laptop all plugged in and ready to roll, but—you need to hit the head. What do you do? Wired's Lore Sjöberg discusses this situation—what he calls the laptop dilemma—in detail, offering five options: Leave your helpless laptop alone, ask a neighbour to watch it, take your laptop with you to the can, take everything with you, or lock it up. Obviously, for safety's sake, you should either lock it up tight or—ideally—bring it along, but we don't always do what we should. On that note, we'd love to hear how you hack the laptop dilemma in the comments. Photo by scottfeldstein.

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