It's selection pressure. Companies that could use loopholes but don't are at a disadvantage in the marketplace to those that do. Similarly, politicians can improve their election chances by pandering to large corporations who ply them with campaign donations. That is, unless the electorate decides to penalize them for doing so and there is enough transparency in campaign financing to allow voters to reasonably decide.
Campaign finance reform anyone?
Adobe Flash has been working on Linux for many years now. Only on some platforms like Ubuntu 10.04, Flash is a bit flaky. I'm running RHEL 5, and on that, Flash runs perfectly stable (the original ATI driver as well, btw).
I see your anecdotal evidence and raise you my anecdotal evidence. I've always had issues using the 64bit flash plugin on linux (on Fedora, Gentoo, and Ubuntu) with errant npviewer.bin processes using 100% cpu or crashing.
Will this "new, magical and unicorn-like" WiFi travel further? Far enough for municipal WiFi to effectively cover its citizens? If so then the increased coverage is more important than the speed improvement (even though the speed bump is might impressive).
At 60GHz you need line-of-sight to make a connection.. walls, buildings, trees, are all a signal killer; much more so than at 2.5/5 GHz. In general in a cluttered environment, your signal will propagate further with a longer wavelength (lower frequency, think AM/FM radio). So in short, no. It will not travel as far.
For line of sight point-to-point applications you can get very high gain from a 60GHz dish (same size dish as 2.5GHz is electrically much larger in wavelengths), though they will probably be more expensive with the tighter manufacturing tolerances required for the smaller feed parts.
"Can you program?" "Well, I'm literate, if that's what you mean!"