patenting the laws of nature

I was looking at two posts by fellow blogger Nick Szabo which mentioned recent Supreme Court cases and their relevance for the possible patentability of "laws of nature" and "algorithms" (posts 1 and 2).

For now, the U.S. patent office says that laws of nature are not patentable.

And get this, neither are inventions that are "not useful" or "offensive to public morality". I wonder what glorious gadgets we're missing out on! Executive desktop toys like a rhino-vomit-based perpetual motion machine?!