You'll find that articles on Lifehacker and Gizmodo are often over simplified, inaccurate, and often biased.
#10 is a good example, land lines of today are very unreliable. My parents have learned to go without theirs for weeks at a time driving to a good cell service spot to make a check in call with a prepaid phone. There is very little profit anymore in home land lines and therefore nothing invested in maintenance of them. AT&T bought our local phone company and the land line service got so bad I ended up cancelling it. Wasn't any point in paying the ever increasing price for something that rarely worked.