Why buying NLOK puts won’t be a cash cow…

NLOK is releasing a special dividend of $12 for shareholders of record for the last week in January 2020. Hooray! We can expect the price of the stock to drop around $12 promptly after the dividend is paid.

So will PUT options at pretty much any strike price be a cash cow? 

Unfortunately, with this special dividend comes a special adjustment to the options contracts. The options contacts will be adjusted so each put carries -12/share in value. Bottom line, short the stock and be on the hook for the dividend payable to shareholders.

NLOK Options Clearing House Memo [pdf]

Difference Between ServiceMark, TradeMark, and Registered TradeMark

Definitions
A Trademark is a name that your company uses that identifies a product that you sell. You can claim ownership of the trademark simply by being the first to use it. In protecting that claim in the future you will need to prove that you used it earlier than an infringing brand.
A Registered trademark is a trademark that has literally been registered with a government entity. This is stronger than a standard trademark because the government will search and only register a trademark if you can prove that nobody else is using it (or that if someone else is, you were first. This extra step makes it easy to fight claims in the future because you don’t need to prove anything, the registration does that for you.
A ServiceMark is a trademark that applies to a service instead of a product.
Use in Commerce
Trademarks, Registered trademark, and service marks are used in commerce.
A Trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, and design that identifies and distinguishes the origin of one product from another.
A ServiceMark (or service marks) are words, phrases, symbols, and designs that identify and distinguish the source of the service rather than the source of the goods.
A Registered trademark is a unique trademark or logo that an individual or company claims to own by submitting the trademark to the relevant government office or agency. The term “Trademark” is often used collectively to refer to Registered Trademarks, Trademarks, and ServiceMarks.
Symbol
The symbol TM can be used with unregistered trademarks (such as MarkTM), The symbols SM can be used with unregistered service marks (such as MarkSM). Symbol ® is used with registered trademarks and service marks such as Mark®.
Specimen
To register a trademark or service mark, the relevant government department requires that the specimen be submitted to the office, and the specimen must display a trademark for commercial use. Requirements differ between trademarks and service marks. The trademark specimen should be the label, tag or container of the product, or a display related to the product. Photocopies or other reproductions of trademark specimens on or in conjunction with the goods are acceptable.
Service trademark specimens must display the trademarks actually used in the sale or advertising of the services described in this application. Regardless of the type of service mark specimen submitted, the correct use of the mark in the business must be demonstrated, which can be determined by the use of the service mark or display as a service mark in the sale of services, including the use or execution of services during the refining, Or display tags used or displayed in service advertisements, including marketing and promotional materials.
Specimens must also display the trademark in a way that creates a direct link between the trademark and the service in the minds of potential consumers. Therefore, although pages from Internet sites can be used as samples, these pages must establish some kind of association between the trademark and the service being advertised.

What is a Service Mark℠?

Service-Mark cognate or relate Trademark. Businesses use Service-Mark to identify their services and distinguish them from other Services provided in the same field. Service-Mark consists of letters, words, symbols, and other contrivances that avail consumers understand the inception or source of a particular Services. Roto-Rooter is an example of a Service-Mark utilized by a familiar plumbing company. In contrast, trademarks are acclimated to distinguish competing products, not Services. Trademarks are conventionally affixed to the product through labels or Marks, while Service-Marks are often exhibited through advertisements and promotions.
Service-Marks are subject to inequitable competition laws. At the federal level, Service-Mark breaches are governed by intellectual property regulations promulgated in many jurisdictions. In some countries, Service-Mark infringements can cause prevalent law lawsuits. Because Service-Mark is a special trademark, the substantive rules and procedural rules governing these two trademarks are essentially identically tantamount. Service-Mark entitlements can be obtained in two ways. First, companies can register trademarks with the government. Several state government has separate registration requisites. Once a Service-Mark is registered, the law conventionally provides aegis for the first mark submitted to the government. Second, companies can obtain Service-Mark rights through public use. However, before licit auspice is obtained, trademarks must be disclosed to the public on a conventional and perpetual substratum. The infrequent or aberrant utilization of a Service-Mark does not bulwark it from infringement.
To be bulwarked, the Service-Mark must withal be unique, unorthodox or unique. Mundane, prevalent and generic trademarks are infrequently eligible for bulwark. For example, professional physician associations will never obtain exclusive rights to register service marks under the name “health care services.” Such marks can hardly distinguish the services provided by the company, nor tell consumers about health.
Caring practitioners. However, if these doctors apply for a trademark under the name “Snap and Jerk Chiropractic Services,” the law will provide them with adequate legal protection. Once a business has established vested rights in a Service-Mark, the law precludes other businesses from promoting their services with illusory, kindred marks. Service-Mark infringement occurs when a particular mark is facilely confounded with other marks already established in the same trade and geographic market. When companies with homogeneous trademarks are located in unrelated fields or provide services in different consumer markets, they have more preponderant liberation. For example, when one company provides pest control services in urban areas and another provides film development services accommodations in rural areas, the court will be more inclined to sanction two companies to apportion the same trademark.
Accommodation-Mark bulwarks the credibility and reputation earned by companies that spend time, energy and mazuma providing quality accommodations to the public. Accommodation-Mark additionally emboldens competition by requiring companies to associate their trademarks with the quality of the accommodations they provide. In this way, the accommodation tag accommodates as a barometer of quality, and consumers can rely on it when making purchasing decisions. However, Accommodation-Mark is often subject to infringement, and consumers become more cautious when inferior accommodations use fraudulently kindred trademarks as competitors’ counterfeit and shoddy products. As a result, licit auspice of accommodation marks bulwarks consumers from transitory expenses for suspicious or unknown sources of accommodations.

What is a Trademark™?

A trademark is any visible sign or contrivance utilized by a business enterprise to identify its goods and distinguish them from goods manufactured or carried by others.
A trademark can be a word or group of words, letters, numbers, equipment, designations, the shape or other appearance of a product or its packaging, a color amalgamation with a logo, a coalescence of colors, and any cumulation of enumerated logos.
By betokening the inchoation of goods and accommodations, trademarks accommodate two paramount purposes.
They provide aegis for manufacturers and traders from the inequitable competition (where one person represents or sells his product as another’s) and provides customers with guarantees against imitation (ascertain they have a certain Expected quality).
In bulwarking the rights of trademark holders, the laws of most countries transcend the rules of inequitable competition because trademarks are considered the property of the trademark holder.
Ergo, unauthorized utilization of a trademark not only constitutes erroneous verbalizations and fraud but additionally breaches the holder’s private property rights.
Albeit most countries require the applicant to have the right to utilize the trademark in good faith after registration, it is not indispensable to utilize the trademark afore submitting an application for registration.
Antecedently, the United States and Pakistan, my country, were one of the few countries that needed genuine use afore registration.
In many countries, trademark ownership is not apperceived until the trademark is registered within a given period of time without dispute, in order to bulwark the anterior utilizer of the trademark.
Even after that duration has elapsed, anterior users may rescind their registration.
After a few years (from 3 to 7 years, depending on the country law), registration and ownership become indisputable.
To register a trademark, it must be unique.
In many cases, a trademark may not be unique when it is first put into use, but over time, the public may give it a secondary denotement, thus composing a concrete connection between the trademark and the product, thus making the trademark Unique and ergo registrable.
When trademark infringement (unauthorized use) occurs, the main licit issue for the court to resolve is whether the alleged infringer’s utilization of the trademark is liable to confound buyers.
In most countries, goods kindred to the goods or accommodations covered by the trademark registration are additionally forfended from infringement.
For a long time, trademark rights cannot be transferred discretely from the enterprise to which the trademark belongs.
However, because trademarks are now considered property, trademarks can be sold, inherited or leased as long as such transfer of rights does not apostatize the public.
In most countries, such transfer describes must be publicly posted.
A mundane form of assignment is an international license, where a trademark holder sanctions a fee to be utilized for the utilization of his trademark abroad.
Conventionally, in this case, the peregrine licensee must meet certain product quality requisites so that its trademark use does not apostatize consumers.
In some cases, trademark rights may be disoriented.
The two most solemn causes of trademark loss are the non-utilization of registered trademarks and the utilization of trademarks that have become prevalent terms.
In many countries, the auspice of a trademark is forfeited if the trademark is not utilized for a certain year.

What is a Registered Trademark®?

A registered trademark is a unique trademark or logo that an individual or company claims to own by submitting a trademark to the relevant government office or agency. Only after the trademark has been successfully registered with the relevant government agency/office can the company use the (R) symbol instead of the TM symbol to trademark its advertising logos, symbols, phrase, words, slogans, products, and services. It is important to work with a lawyer when making a successful trademark registration, as mistakes in the process can leave a company vulnerable to infringement and lawsuits that claim to violate its competitors’ rights. This legal loophole can cost a company a lot of time, effort, money, and other resources, so it’s usually best to work/engage with a lawyer to ensure the successful registration of a new qualified branded device/service without delay.
Once a trademark registration attempt is successful, no other company will be able to legally safeguard work that is too similar for as long as the trademark remains active. In general, if a competing company markets itself or its wares using a word, phrase, symbol, etc., but fails to properly distinguish the competitor’s work from a trademarked work, the competitor may be held accountable for infringing upon protected intellectual property laws.
For example, if a competing electronics manufacturer used a graphic of a plump orange with a detached stem and a small bite out of one side to brand its work, it would likely be held accountable for infringing upon the Apple Corporation’s registered (and immediately recognizable/distinguishable) logo.
Registered trademarks give companies greater rights in all states than other companies
Extensive use of trademark works in specific industries to distinguish them from competitors and attract a wider public.
A properly registered trademark also enables the company to receive three times the damages to the infringer.
Registered trademarks not only prevent imitators, but they also provide a large presumption of company ownership in the courts.
In part for these reasons, registered trademarks are preferable to unregistered trademarks.
If you want to do additional preliminary research on this subject before meeting with an experienced intellectual property lawyer, consider learning more about how to register your trademark.
Typically, the registration process requires a lawyer to search for existing trademark works to ensure that the trademark under review is unique.
In the current business atmosphere, a brand name is considered more vital than a business name.
Everyone is loyal to one brand and this loyalty comes after the satisfaction of end-user by the use of that brand.
With regard to a brand name, many fake companies are misusing the brand name of well-known companies.
Hence, result in damaging the image of the brand of the company.
If you want to save the brand name of your company, that is the pride of your company, you must register the trademark for your brand name, logo, image, signature and graphs of your company.
Save Your Brand- Get Registered Your Brand

Searching Trademark ®, ™, & ℠ Symbols

Trademarks typically come in three varieties: ®, ™, ℠

Trademark symbols are typically seen in three varieties, ® for a ‘registered trademark’, ™ for simply ‘trademark’ – not necessarily registered, and ℠ or ‘service mark’ – also may or may not be registered.

In the U.S., trademarks are filed both on state-level and nationally. For companies operating between states, it is more common to see the trademark registered in the U.S. Trademark & Patent Office federal database of trademarks. For small local companies operating only regionally, registering in the federal database may be of less importance is sometimes forgone as it is typically more costly than a state-level registration.

Searching for trademarks can be done here or using the form below:

 

   

Fix macOS / OSX White-Washed Display

As part of the display brightness feature of the new OSX Catalina, I’ve noticed my display will sometimes get a bit white-washed in order to provide maximum brightness in settings with lots of light (such as outside).

This feature can come in handy for some, but it also seems to be a bit buggy and can become ‘stuck’ leading to an apparently white-washed, un-saturated display where the colors are all flat and the blacks are clearly not black.

White-washed Macbook Pro 16 inch

The steps to resolve this issue if your display seems to be stuck in this mode:

  1. Open System Preferences
  2. Navigate to Displays
  3. Click the “Color” tab
  4. Change the “Display Profile” to any other profile.
  5. Change it back to your preferred display profile (Color LCD is default)

Upon changing the display profile, the saturation/contrast issue should be resolved.

System Preferences Pane with Displays Highlighted
Color Settings on Display Preferences

cloudflareinsights.com cross-site warning in chrome

A cookie associated with a cross-site resource at https://cloudflareinsights.com/ was set without the `SameSite` attribute. A future release of Chrome will only deliver cookies with cross-site requests if they are set with `SameSite=None` and `Secure`. You can review cookies in developer tools under Application>Storage>Cookies and see more details at https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592 and https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5633521622188032.

CloudFlareInsights.com provides some browser load-time analytics. These tools allow webmasters to diagnose website speed issues and see what browsers are spending the most time loading. The warning is generated because Chrome will be disabling this cookie in future releases for security purposes.

Nothing needs to be done to resolve this warning. Cloudflare will likely make code changes in the future before chrome loses support for this cookie.

Here’s an example of some of the data webmasters can get with the CloudFlare Browser Insights tool.

CloudFlare Insights Snapshot
Country-level loading data

Get set up with a Progressive Web App Service Worker on your site in 5 min

If your site isn’t already set up with a Service Worker, Chrome’s debugging tools throw a few errors under the “Progressive Web App” section of webpage auditing.

Current page does not respond with a 200 when offline

start_url does not respond with a 200 when offlineNo usable web app manifest found on page.

Does not register a service worker that controls page and start_url

Web app manifest does not meet the installability requirements Failures: No manifest was fetched.

A service worker enables your web app to be reliable in unpredictable network conditions. Learn more.

You’ll need 2 basic elements for a service worker, a sw.js file and a small snippet of code to be included on all pages you want the service worker active on.

Step 1: sw.js

This is the sw.js code. You’ll likely want to upload this code to your website example.com/sw.js

const cacheName = `serviceworker-0.6.18`;
self.addEventListener('install', e => {
  e.waitUntil(
    caches.open(cacheName).then(cache => {
      return cache.addAll([
        `/`,
        `/index.html`,
        `/styles/main.css`,
        `/scripts/main.min.js`,
      ])
          .then(() => self.skipWaiting());
    })
  );
});

self.addEventListener('activate', event => {
  event.waitUntil(self.clients.claim());
});

self.addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  event.respondWith(
    caches.open(cacheName)
      .then(cache => cache.match(event.request, {ignoreSearch: true}))
      .then(response => {
      return response || fetch(event.request);
    })
  );
});

Before uploading the code, you’ll need to modify the cache.addAll file list to include the required javascript/css files for your site, logos and required images, as well as any pages you would like accessible while your user is offline. Delete index.html and the styles/scripts files included unless your files are located in the same location. I suggest including your top 3 pages (homepage, contact page, etc). Be aware, these pages will be loaded in the background by every browser visiting your site. You may also want to change “serviceworker-0.6.18” to the name of your site/service-worker.

Step 2. <script>

The second required element is the service worker script:

      if('serviceWorker' in navigator) {
        navigator.serviceWorker.register('/sw.js', { scope: '/' })
          .then(function(registration) {
                console.log('Service Worker Registered');
          });

        navigator.serviceWorker.ready.then(function(registration) {
           console.log('Service Worker Ready');
        });
      }

Place this code within a <script> </script> element somewhere on your page.  You can use the console.log messages to ensure your service worker is getting registered properly.

Step 3. manifest.json

Although not required, you can add a manifest.json file to the root of your website to enable it to be installed as an app.

{
  "name": "Website Full Name",
  "short_name": "WebsiteShortName",
  "icons": [
    {
      "src": "/images/icons-192.png",
      "type": "image/png",
      "sizes": "192x192"
    },
    {
      "src": "/images/icons-512.png",
      "type": "image/png",
      "sizes": "512x512"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "en-US",
  "start_url": "/",
  "display": "standalone",
  "background_color": "white",
  "theme_color": "white"
}

You’ll need a png image at least 192×192 to pass all the Chrome audits.