Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Prop 19, California’s controversial bid to legalize marijuana, lost at the polls on Tuesday by a slim margin: Just 53.9% of voters said “No” to the proposal.

However, if that vote had been up to the wider web of Internet users, Prop 19 would have passed with a 55% majority.

According to data gathered by Yahoo during the company’s Ask America online survey, more than 8 million responses were recorded overall. With regard to Prop 19, 133,000 online “votes” were cast on the question of whether marijuana should be legal. In Yahoo’s survey, a slightly higher number of responses favored marijuana legalization.

Clearly, this is one of the more controversial topics that arose around the midterm elections. But Yahoo also tracked other popular issues from the American political landscape — from Tea Party antics to immigration and healthcare.

When it comes to right wing-left wing bickering, 72% of Yahoo’s respondents said the political discourse had reached an unnatural level of animosity. However, 61% said they were not too worried about Tea Partiers steering Congress in a radically right direction.

Around 75% of respondents actually favored Arizona’s controversial and conservative new immigration laws, saying they’d approve of such measures in their home states. And 65% said they wanted the U.S.’s newly passed healthcare laws to remain in effect.

To see other issues and results, check out this inforgraphic based on survey data, created by JESS3:

Click image for larger version.

Of course, Yahoo’s data was gathered from a wide range of Internet users, not all of whom were eligible to vote.

This infographic is the fourth and final installment in the Ask America series based on Yahoo’s data. Images were created by interactive agency JESS3.

Header image courtesy of Flickr, GUS314159.

I think laziness has changed.

It used to be about avoiding physical labor. The lazy person could nap or have a cup of tea while others got hot and sweaty and exhausted. Part of the reason society frowns on the lazy is that this behavior means more work for the rest of us.

When it came time to carry the canoe over the portage, I was always hard to find. The effort and the pain gave me two good reasons to be lazy.

But the new laziness has nothing to do with physical labor and everything to do with fear. If you’re not going to make those sales calls or invent that innovation or push that insight, you’re not avoiding it because you need physical rest. You’re hiding out because you’re afraid of expending emotional labor.

This is great news, because it’s much easier to become brave about extending yourself than it is to become strong enough to haul an eighty pound canoe.

Online and mobile reservation service OpenTable released its third-quarter financial results, which showed significant year-over-year gains in revenue, restaurant installations and total seated diners.

Most notably, the publicly traded company posted $24.5 million in total revenues for Q3 2010, a 44% increase over the same quarter last year.

OpenTable is also reporting a 52% increase in year-over-year diners with 15.4 seated diners for this past quarter. The company now says it has an client base of 13,025 restaurants in North America — a 26% increase since September 30, 2009.

CEO Jeffrey Jordan also revealed in an interview with Barron’s West Coast Editor Eric Savitz at the FASTech conference earlier today that OpenTable will now focus on international expansion efforts in the U.K., Germany and Japan.

In September, OpenTable acquired U.K. competitor TopTable for $55 million. Jordan disclosed that the deal was nine months in the making, but now that it’s closed, the company can work to aggressively expand beyond its existing 2,000-restaurant base in the U.K.

One thing we found particularly insightful is the fact that OpenTable generates a significant majority of traffic from its own mobile applications and website. Jordan shared that, in aggregate, the company’s numerous syndication partners — Yelp, Zagat, Google, CitySearch etc. — only generate a fraction of OpenTable reservations, 5% to 10% to be exact.

OpenTable shares saw a 10.78% bump today following yesterday’s financial report, closing at $68.02. All signs indicate that OpenTable is a financially sound company.

Plus, while Jordan wouldn’t reveal financial specifics around the company’s newly started deal initiative, he did go so far as to say that Spotlight has, “generated interesting revenue pretty quickly.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Robert Scoble

It was cool when VW let us “drive” the Scirocco on our iPhones. It was cooler when Skoda had us cutting out our own paper steering wheels and aiming them at a webcam. But driving a real-life, in-the-flesh, on the road brand new Mitsubishi SUV using only the arrow keys on your computer?

Awesome, if we could only get it to work.

On Monday, Mitsubishi debuted the Outlander Sport Live Drive, a unique test drive where anyone stuck at work, sitting in an airport or lying in bed can pilot a car on a test course in LA. The new SUV is hooked up to a remote control system that steers, stops and accelerates the vehicle in forward and reverse based on arrow key inputs given by drivers sitting at their computer. A series of cameras give the virtual driver a bird’s-eye view in addition to a look out the front, side and rear windows.

Sure it’s a gimmick, but it’s a pretty cool one. Just tapping arrow keys, we might as well be editing a really big spreadsheet. But there’s a flippin’ car on the other end of those arrow keys.

Problem is, we couldn’t connect no matter how hard we tried. We kept getting an error that said we “appear to be behind a firewall that prevents you from connecting the vehicle,” no matter which connection or computer we used.

We’ll keep trying, but if you can do any better, please let us know as we’d love to try out a test drive.

So, we settled for watching Eddie from Ohio on the spectator cam. He didn’t have any better luck than we did, as the car stayed still for more than 10 minutes. That’s par for the course in LA, but this time there didn’t appear to be any traffic. Shortly thereafter, an error message came up. “We’re checking something on the car. We’ll be back up soon.”

Among the tech they’d check would be servo motors and real-time GPS mapping. It was all put together by ad agencies 180 LA and Schematic, production company B-Reel, web designer Simon Cave and robotics expert Dr. James Brighton of Cranfield University. You might remember Brighton from the life-size remote-control Hummer H3 he built a few years back.

Though we never got any real time behind the arrow keys, playing around with the practice course gave us a feel for the virtual test drive. You pilot the Outlander around a course doing your best to drive over markings that represent the vehicle’s features, such as its stereo system or gas mileage. For each feature you drive over, you get points. Of course we tried to drive the car off the track. No dice: The car stops and the jerk behind the wheel loses their turn to drive.

Finally, the car was back online. We watched five drivers and not a single one tried to drive over any of the features. One kept accelerating, stopping, then putting the car in reverse (ouch). Another just accelerated hard, cutting left and right and apparently trying to test the car’s rollover protection. Finally, Jean from Massachusetts followed the rules — and showed us just how many skid marks had been left on the track by the hoons who went before.

Photo: Mitsubishi