I always thought you could set your "maximum limit" for spending on cloud providing platforms.

Oh, it's just racking millions of dollars from big bank users every year. Nothing a script-kiddy couldn't achieve...

> they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.

Adobe tries to fight that, as this leads to genericization[1]. Their trademark guidelines[2] state a number of examples, like:

"Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form. Correct: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software. Incorrect: The image was photoshopped."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

[2]: https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html

Does that include the start menu search or cortana or whatever it's called these days?

Here's a very cheap way to get started:

I'm going to assume you have a Windows computer that you can leave on 24/7.

Go get Virtual Box (an open-source VM application) https://www.virtualbox.org/ and download a .iso from a distribution of your choice. (Maybe even try a few different distributions.)

Install Linux on the VM. Whenever you set up a service, open up a port for it on your router. Use Dyndns https://account.dyn.com/ or No-ip https://www.noip.com/ to set up a domain.

The advantages of the above approaches is that they require little (or no) money to start, and allow you to try a lot of different things. The nice things about VMs is that you can make a few of them, and back them up before you make changes, so it's easy to make mistakes and go back.

If / when you're ready to spend some money, you can either move to a physical computer or a VM hosted somewhere. Just hold off on doing this until after you've made a few mistakes.

There's a Toys-R-Us joke in there somewhere.

Minimal orbital speed is somewhere around 25,000-28,000 kph. The fastest air breathing plane every built (SR-71) had a top speed of about 3,500 kph. So for the added weight and complexity of adding an air breathing first stage (wings, air breathing engines, landing gear etc) you are only getting about 14% of the way to the minimal orbital velocity needed, and that would be if your air breathing first stage could match the performance of the fastest plane ever built, keep in mind the SR-71 carried almost no payload. It is far more likely that any realistic air breathing first stage is going to get to less than 10% of orbital velocity, and that would likely be for launching a fairly small rocket. On the other hand the Falcon 9 first stage usually doesn't separate until 6,000-9,000 kph which is closer to 25-35% of orbital velocity, and that's while carrying almost 23,000 kg of payload plus the fully fueled second stage.