I'm interested in buying a house as an investment property and am wondering if it's a faux pas to reach out to the seller's Realtor directly, as opposed to getting an agent of my own.  I could hire my own agent easily enough, but I'd hope that if I didn't have an agent, I could negotiate a lower sales price, because the seller would not have to pay commissions to my agent. (In my area, the seller's agent and buyer's agent both typically get 3 percent of the sales price, so if I don't have an agent, then the seller only has to lose 3 percent to Realtors rather than 6 percent.)  I'd be buying the house in cash, and have bought investment properties before without Realtors involved, so I don't have much need of my own agent's guidance anyway.  I know I can contact the seller's agent directly; there is nothing to stop me. But I'm wondering if this is normal, or if would make me look like I don't know what I'm doing. I'm in the United States, for what it's worth.
I want to buy a home, but I'm not interested in using a realtor as a buyer's agent.  I know that in MLS systems, when a realtor lists a house they specify what commission a buyer's agent will be paid.  Since I am the one who is bringing a qualified buyer to the listing agent, I feel that I would should get the commission (even if it is in the form of a discount on the house).    Essentially, the seller would get the same amount of money at closing... the listing agent would get the same commission as they normally would for showing the house to someone with a buyer's agent... but I would pay less for the house.  Is there a tactful way to negotiate this with the listing realtor?  For example, should I make a side contract with the realtor to pay me the commission at closing?  Or perhaps I can specify in my offer that they should reduce their fees to the seller by the commission amount if the offer is accepted, in order to make my offer more attractive?  Are these types of deals ever done, and if so, is there a conventional way to make it happen?  Thanks
How to gather full network usage statistics on a freebsd router? I have a freebsd box, which serves as a router from LAN to the outside world. It has several Internet providers, OpenVPN servers and clients, NAT and so on.  I would like to have complete statistics on when, who, to whom, via which provider, via which protocol, and how many bytes have been sent.   I agree that the minimal time scale will be an hour, i.e. no need for millisecond precision.  I tried vnstat2, ntopng and some other programs, but they don't seemed to have what I need or it is not obvious.   I don't understand, why this feature is not easily available. But I am not good in freebsd, so please, give me some clues. Finding the missing digits of $23!$ Whenever I add a Quick Smoke effect, I can't preview it on the viewport unless I bake it.   And Yes, I added the Smoke Domain on the object.   I've seen tutorials like this  and this  that clearly shows the possibility of previewing the smoke before baking it.   I'm using Blender on a Mac with AMD GPU. I would guess that this is something related to OpenGL, as thoroughly explained here -  but that's for Windows.   Does anyone have any idea how to fix this? I have an integrated webcam in my laptop. I know that it works and that ubuntu recognized it because at installation it asked if I wanted a photo taken for some kind of image associated with my account. When I look in system settings, I do not see any webcam in the hardware section. I would like to disable the webcam like you can do in Windows, but as I can't find it in my hardware section, how can I disable it? I cannot even unplug it as it is integrated into the monitor. Am I looking in the wrong place?? I am using 12.04 How to show $\lim_{n \to \infty} a_n = \frac{ [x] + [2x] + [3x] + \dotsb + [nx] }{n^2} = x/2$? Electron flow and electric potential In the physics tutorial topic on current electricity it defines the positive terminal as the high potential terminal and the negative as the low potential. When talking about positive test charges this analogy makes sense, the charge moves from the +ve to the -ve where it loses potential till it has to be "topped" up by the cell.   What confuses me when they begin talking electrons. Using this analogy would mean that the electrons move from the -ve to the +ve but this means it would work against the electric field so the potential energy increases till it reaches the +ve terminal.   My question is how does this analogy, if it does, change to accommodate electrons? Does the electric field reverse so the -ve terminal is the high potential and the +ve the low potential? Convert bytes to a string I'm using this code to get standard output from an external program:  &gt;&gt;&gt; from subprocess import * &gt;&gt;&gt; command_stdout = Popen(['ls', '-l'], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0]   The communicate() method returns an array of bytes:  &gt;&gt;&gt; command_stdout b'total 0\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file1\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file2\n'   However, I'd like to work with the output as a normal Python string. So that I could print it like this:  &gt;&gt;&gt; print(command_stdout) -rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file1 -rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file2   I thought that's what the  method is for, but when I tried it, I got the same byte array again:  &gt;&gt;&gt; binascii.b2a_qp(command_stdout) b'total 0\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file1\n-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 Mar  3 07:03 file2\n'   How do I convert the bytes value back to string? I mean, using the "batteries" instead of doing it manually. And I'd like it to be OK with Python&nbsp;3. Probability of winning the game "1-2-3" There are 'n' candies and 't' boxes. Find the number of ways to place the candies in the boxes for each of the conditions (given in the problem). There are 'n' candies and 't' boxes. Find the number of ways to place the candies in the boxes for each of the conditions (all the candies must be spread out) : (a) candies and boxes are different; (b) candies of the same diiferent boxes should not be empty cartons: (c) candies equally new, boxes are different; Edit :(d) candies are different, the boxes are the same, there should be no empty boxes; (e) candies of different boxes alike.(Edit : candies are different, boxes are equal) Specify the display type that matches the placement, if possible. My Answers : (a) Each layout is encoded with a word of $n$ letters from the alphabet of 't' letters $\implies$ possible $n^t$ variants. (b) Write, $n$ candies in the form of balls ina line, we need to put $(t-1)$ partition in $(n-1)$ place, but we can't put two partitions on one place, so we get : $^{t-1}C_{n-1}$. (c) First we need to choose a candy in a box (in the first box $n$ ways, in the second box $(n-1)$, $\cdots$ in the $t-th$ : $(n-t+1)$ ways $\implies$ total $n!/(n-t)!$ methods, and then we distribute the remaining $(n-t)$ candies into $t$ boxes, this is encoded with owrds from the alphabets (for each candy $t$ variants) $\implies$ $t^{n-t}$. The Answer is : $\frac {n!}{(n-t)!}*t^(n-t)$ Are my answers (a), (b) &amp; (c) are correct? For (d) &amp; (e) I don't know how to proceed? Please help me. Ship an application with a database If your application requires a database and it comes with built in data, what is the best way to ship that application? Should I:   Precreate the SQLite database and include it in the .apk? Include the SQL commands with the application and have it create the database and insert the data on first use?   The drawbacks I see are:   Possible SQLite version mismatches might cause problems and I currently don't know where the database should go and how to access it. It may take a really long time to create and populate the database on the device.   Any suggestions? Pointers to the documentation regarding any issues would be greatly appreciated. Strange book where teen protagonist is sent to a warzone, uses illusory magic to grow male genitalia Pandas Merging 101 I'm completing a problem set, one problem for which I literally have no idea what to do on. The graders would prefer to have a physical copy of the problem so I thought it best to include the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji as my answer, instead of something like "Dunno" or "No idea."  Option #1 is to include an image.  Beyond that I actually don't understand how this emoji works. The middle character is Japanese kana "tsu" and proves problematic - TeX wants it in math mode then renders "?" when it is. How to install an application that requires gksu package on ubuntu 18.04? I downloaded the Upwork desktop App on ubuntu 18.04. When I open it with Gdebi package installer I saw this error:    I tried to install gksu manually via sudo apt install gksu but I got this error  Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done Package gksu is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source  E: Package 'gksu' has no installation candidate   How can I install this software on ubuntu 18.04 (I download it yesturday so it is the most recent version on upwork website) ? This is inspired by some discussions in .  In the Harry Potter universe, how are Dementors born?  Or are they artificially created by some magical means? How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree Easiest way to read from and write to files Prove $(a^2+b^2)(c^2+d^2)\ge (ac+bd)^2$ for all $a,b,c,d\in\mathbb{R}$.  So $(a^2+b^2)(c^2+d^2) = a^2c^2+a^2d^2+b^2c^2+b^2d^2$  and $(ac+bd)^2 = a^2c^2+2acbd+b^2d^2$  So the problem is reduced to proving that $a^2d^2+b^2c^2\ge2acbd$ but I am not sure how to show that Remove impossible badges from per-site metas Per-site metas lists some badges that are impossible to get. For example  lists:         But these are impossibly to get because per-site metas do not support bounties, were not in a beta stage or Area 51 proposals. I therefore suggest that these badges are removed from the per-site metas. They have no function and they are confusing. There are already badges that are unavailable on per-site metas but available on the main sites:    Convention Quorum  This seems to suggest that per-site metas should only contain badges that can be possibly awarded. Submitting a form by pressing enter without a submit button Well I am trying to submit a form by pressing enter but not displaying a submit button. I don't want to get into JavaScript if possible since I want everything to work on all browsers (the only JS way I know is with events).  Right now the form looks like this:  &lt;form name="loginBox" target="#here" method="post"&gt;     &lt;input name="username" type="text" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;     &lt;input name="password" type="password" /&gt;     &lt;input type="submit" style="height: 0px; width: 0px; border: none; padding: 0px;" hidefocus="true" /&gt; &lt;/form&gt;   Which works pretty well. The submit button works when the user presses enter, and the button doesn't show in Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and Chrome. However, I still don't like the solution since it is hard to know whether it will work on all platforms with all browsers.  Can anyone suggest a better method? Or is this about as good as it gets?