Most /. readers had an ant farm as a kid and loved it.
Keeping a beehive is a natural extension of that love.
A glass walled beehive in your house is an unnatural extension of that love but it is damn cool.

I love this idea and it does work when done correctly. Imagine the ant farm you had as a kid. Now replace the ants with bees. Now make it so the whole thing doesn't die after a month. That's what you have when this is done correctly!

Like many slashdotters (apparently) I am a beekeeper. I go a step closer to this particular type of insanity though in that I construct hives similar to what this article features. Well, actually not that similar because mine actually work and this one is wrong in more than a few ways. I've constructed a few that didn't work and I've made some that do work and from my failures I can tell you that the following things are wrong with this design:
1) The hive is stationary and it is inside of your house.
Expecting the caretaker to work on the hive inside of their house is a bad idea. For this to work the hive must have the ability to be taken outside
2) Releasing calming smoke into the hive.
This is just a bad idea. In a hive as small as this smoke does little good and releasing smoke in the wrong area of the hive actually has the opposite effect.
3) Pull a cord to collect honey.
I could see this working actually, the queen will only lay eggs in cells with specific properties so having a spring or something with a cord attached to it could allow a pull of that cord to release honey to drip down. Unfortunately that drip would be covered in bees attempting to repair the damage within seconds. The larger problem is that the few cells that were damaged to retrieve this honey would not be immediately filled, it would take a few weeks to be able to pull the cord again to get honey.
5) Allow in orange light so the bees can see.
What? Seriously? The bees prefer a dark hive, no light. They communicate by scent and touch. Tinted glass allows us to see the bees, not allowing the bees to see each other. The glass isn't a problem though, bees do fine in a glass hive as long as they are not in direct sunlight and they can still find their way out of the hive by walking towards the brightest source of light they can see.

There are more problems but I can forgive the rest because this is an artistic representation of a sexy design. An observation hive in your house is great and it works well with little maintenance when done correctly and this hive may convince some to give it a try.

If I'm forced to make my electric vehicle loud I will do two things:
1) Play some ANNOYING sound VERY LOUD
2) Add a message which reads "Don't like what you hear? Repeal the ‘Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010’."

I bike or walk whenever I can, I detest the vehicle noise my city is drowning in.

What's Mr. Belvedere doing in a Monty Python sketch?

I have three Langstroth hives that I don't use foundation in. This gives the natural (vairable) cell size which I believe is beneficial. These are also some of the hives I don't treat for Varroa in since I produce treatment free honey in addition to regular honey. I think this is my last year going completely without foundation, even though I start a box with a few drawn frames as guides it takes longer for them to be filled with usable comb. I've noticed that when conditions aren't perfect the bees will still draw new comb from foundation but they will only draw new foundation when they have a strong nectar flow or they are from a recent swarm.

As a practical beekeeper I feel it is my duty to take this one step further and speculate on how to apply this finding to saving my bees. Virus transmission should be kept to a minimum, I can't think of much else to do to keep a virus like this in check. The primary vector for honeybee viruses is the varroa mite and this pest continues to be the primary killer of honeybees despite all of the hubub about this "Colony Collapse Disorder". Finding that this mite has a hand in CCD is no surprise to me. Nosema is not new to the beekeeping world although N. ceranae is a bigger problem than the tamer N. apis that we're used to dealing with. The treatment is the same though, feed Fumidil B. The bad news is that there isn't much new here so there won't be a silver bullet cure. Keep the bees healthy as best we can, that's about all I can see here.

Farewell Starcraft II, we had a good run but my heart now lies with Civilization V.

I agree that Billy Mitchell seemed like a villain in the movie. Without a villain there aren't heroes though, and without Billy Mitchell there wouldn't be a "King of Kong" and hardly anyone would care who holds the high score in a game from 1981. Where would professional wrestling be without guys like Billy Mitchell? I don't know, but no one would care.