Actually, the deeds, surveys, sale contracts, liens, covenants, easements and all that other stuff are still publicly available, and no more difficult to get at than they normally were. It's called the Notarial Archives -- New Orleans is one of the few (I think only) to still have an active one in the states. (New York has one, but for historical purposes only -- no new documents are being added to it.)

If you go to www.notarialarchives.org, you'll see it's connected to the Clerk of Courts -- but part of the deal with the documents is that they have to be publicly available. Which is why they're all in books, and all available to the public ... even after Katrina. I worked there at the time, and we had to set up in the Conference Center, organizing boxes that we retrieved from the office across from the Superdome (you know, on that street that was flooded).

I'll bet they do have a lot of data entry to do, and I don't envy them that process, but real estate people (and their lawyers) have not lost the capability to research provenance by any means. It's just a matter of restoring the info that made the process a little easier.

While the ratio of 50% does seem high to me, there's no contradiction between a 64-bit OS and a 32-bit app. Windows 7 64-bit (and numerous other 64-bit operating systems) can run 32-bit apps.

I'm not sure I see the supposed conflict in the last statement.

I'd have to agree.

Phrasonyms like "disincentivize" have de-optomated the English languagization.

Yes, but ... this is Slashdot. Anything mentioned in the GNU GPL can thusly not be considered a fictional company. *grin*