Fubar

In the passage describing Source Victoria it is mentioned that "ecosystems were especially tiresome when they got fubared" (emphasis not in the original). The meaning is that ecosystems are hard to control from an engineering point of view, once they are destroyed, the term fubar meaning fucked up beyond any repair.

The usage of Fubar in this sense is usally traced back to the United States Armed Forces in World War II. The term was also picked up by computer scientists and engineers, either in direct reference to World War II Army jargon or commonly inspired by comic books and cartoons.

In the middle of the 1990s computer geeks were quite self-aware of this through the popularity of the Jargon file and related publications that circled between students of major institutions where computer science was taught (namely the MIT and Stanford). The wide-spread use of the metasyntactic variable names foo and baris etymologically related and traced back to the same sources.

Links

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR
• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fubar
• http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/F/foo.html
• http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html