I am not a lawyer but the way I understand it is, in the old days you could get a patent for a machine that separates cotton fibers (a complete and specific des

I am not a lawyer but the way I understand it is, in the old days you could get a patent for a machine that separates cotton fibers (a complete and specific design for creating something that does this), but not for "a machine that separates cotton fibers" (the very concept of such a thing, and all possible implementations of said concept, accompanied by a crude description of what such a thing might look like, given a sufficiently smart compiler). What it sounds like to me is that the court is leaving open the possibility of software patents that are more like the former case, although the vast majority are more like the latter.