If you know anything about me (and lets face it, if you are reading this, you probably do), then you know I am very against software patents. Thats why this is great news. From the article:

n a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”

Thats the best of all worlds I think - general purpose alogrithms (like the ones that I use every day) are not patentable, but important machine specific things like microcode (which are important to my company) are. This is a great thing for software developers everywhere, especially those of us striving toward making the open source community play well with others.