It's quite obvious that the guy has no idea what he's talking about (e.g. "Money was very quickly given to corporations with no government oversight. Exactly how libertarians would want it.")

Actually, it fits a pattern that's been around since the Usenet days. We computer guys are masters of our digital domains. We often think that we can instantly understand anything that's well documented. The result is that the Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Economics guys are often annoyed at the stuff we post.

Dude has just made up his own definition of a word in order to have something to rant about. What would you call it?

This is called a straw man fallacy. If you had originally said this, instead of resorting to another logical fallacy, you might have been taken more seriously.

But you are still attacking the person, rather than his argument.

Okay, then, Zed's argument fits the pattern of something formulated by someone outside of their area of expertise.

Zed has exhibited difficulty with the precise use of terminology before. In the recent talk that was posted, you hear him saying for people not to come up and correct him on his use of terms like "Turing Complete."

http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cu...

There are other terms that he unintentionally abuses in the talk. (left as exercise) Still, I think it's a great talk and agree with a lot of what he says. He reminds me of a coworker of mine. This coworker is hazy on things like the laws of Thermodynamics and some aspects of Object Oriented Programming, but he seems to get things done, and I'd have to say he's a good programmer.

I shudder to think what Zed's code is like. Did I say rm? I meant cp...

Not really: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376670