Everybody realizes, don’t they, that the end of book 7 will reveal this all to be a dream?
Will it tell me who shot J.R. and why the last season of Roseanne stunk?
I would guess that a prophecy is intended primarily to give information about what will be, and (implicitly) what may be. The prophecy itself will come true. What people do with it determines the way it comes true.
Rowling has been asked an awful ot of these sorts of consistency questions, and I have to say that most of her answers seem pretty decent, at least consistent with the tone of the series. There are a lot of things that just aren’t in the books and should be (the biggest one still being the “what the hell was the elaborate Goblet of Fire plot against Harry supposed to accomplish that couldn’t have been accomplished by turning Harry’s underwear into a portkey?”), but Rowling does seem to have thought a lot about many of them and hinted enough in the books for it to be plausible. Why don’t they just create stuff? Because just like in the regular world, lots of enchanments and other objects are extremely hard to create yourself: many wizards could no doubt create a decent broomstick, but not a Nimbus 2000. And purely conjured things seem unpredictable in their stability and authenticity anyway. Why don’t the wizards interact more with the muggle world? In part because for centuries the wizards had basically had far superior technology and the muggles were mostly medival barbarians without any cool stuff. Wizards stopped caring much about their affairs, and built their own worlds. Now that muggles have advanced, they still don’t pay them much attention. Besides, magic is way more interesting than iPods for crissake!
Any evidence that they don’t? Harry knows what those things are, since Dudley has all of them, but do you think that Harry would ever be allowed within ten feet of Dudley’s iPod? And we never see Hermione or any of the other Muggle-born students in a nonmagical situation where those things would be useable. For all we know, Hermione spends her summers surfing the Dope.
That’s unlikely. Was the SDMB around in 1996?
And correcting people’s spelling.
And telling people off for language in the Pit.
Or is that the fanon part of my memory leaking into the canon part?
I guess not. So you think Pansy Parkinson has a poster of Tom Felton in her dorm?