admin (uid == 1) cant flag things?

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature. But I've run into a problem in that the admin user (uid 1) cannot use flags at all. I looked in the code and indeed there is no check for uid == 1. This however shouldnt even be required if the role of "Authenticated user" is set. But regardless of what roles are set, the admin can never actually use flags. If I try to print a flag link for example and view the page as the admin user, the link simply isnt there because the flag_flag_access() function is returning FALSE on these lines:

elseif ($flag->access_author == 'others' && $node->uid == $account->uid) {
    echo "hihi3";
      return FALSE;
    }

Note the hihi3. I named every single false and this is the one that came back. What exactly is this telling me? From what I can see it says that admin is associated with 'others' and that 'others' is also the node owner? The actual owner of the node is indeed uid 1. Where is this 'others' thing coming from and what is it's purpose? If we are the node owner, and uid 1, wouldnt it make sense to automatically return TRUE no matter what since admin is always allowed access to everything and should NEVER be denied access to anything at all? If it were me, I'd consider this a bug and patch it by adding a check for uid == 1 and return TRUE all the time. Why is this check not in the flag_flag_access() function? I suppose I could add a module that does this, but that goes against basic practices since I shouldnt need to allow admin for anything, it should just work out of the box that way and then a module can disallow access to it if they so please. This would have saved me an hour of debugging if it functioned this way instead.