This is another example of rediculous patents. It's like trying to patent the wheel. There must be tons of prior art out there. For one, I've used Oracle parallel query since Oracle7, which was somewhere around 1998. When will you Americans stop to subsidise the lawyers this way? It's a silly system whereby you have to get as many patents as possible, just to fight of somebody else doing the same thing, and the one who can pay the most lawyers wins...

Being a foreigner from a so-called friendly nation, I'm used to the rediculous and non-privacy respecting entry into the so called land of the free. My laptop contains an OS (well, two: XP and Linux). All documents and other stuff are on the net or on SD-cards. Should I have anything to conceal, I would get data in and out of the US like I assume any criminal/terrorist would do: over the internet. Send it encrypted by mail, store it on online-backup, hell, you could even store it on gmail using GFS. In short, this is one of many US measures that only invade individual privacy/freedom of innocent civilians. The real culprits have zillions of ways around this. I can hear Osama laughing his head off in some cave in Afghanistan. I say: keep it up. Given the rate you annoy allies and the way you run your financials, it will be soon that the US is no longer of importance and there is no need to travel to the US and you can celibrate your constitution among yourselves.