They have existing cases that say that it's permissible, so operating on that basis without this judge ruling should be possible.
This is one of those things that should be hard (for relative values of difficulty) for police to do. They claim it would take LE five guys to watch him. My response is: So? If you want to get the guy, either assign five guys or get a warrant. It doesn't seem like it would be difficult to do if there's already evidence against him. That kind of thing doesn't appear to be invasive in the way that a black-bag bugging operation would be, and judges tend to be lenient with such requests.
Judges routinely hold cases where it affects how law enforcement operates. It doesn't always happen, but it's pretty common when cases are pending at higher levels. The FBI may have pushed for a ruling here because of legal uncertainties, but it suggests something in how widespread warrantless GPS tracking may be if this decision throws off the entire agency.
The NDAA has yet to be challenged. While you seem to have already decided how a future court (which may or may not look like the current court) will decide it, it's very hard to guess where some justices will come down, especially on things like unlimited confinement for an arrest made in US jurisdictions. Chief Justice Rehnquist was in favor of California legalizing medical marijuana, for example, something that surprised many.
Back to the original point, the judge doesn't have to throw out a case. He can simply put the case on hold pending resolution at higher levels unless for some reason the defendant's rights (such as to a speedy trial) are being violated by holding off. This kind of thing happens fairly often. Even appellate courts do this when an en banc or Supreme Court hearing on a similar issue is pending.
Judges will usually hold a case where a higher court is hearing a case that could affect it to prevent it from having to be reviewed (or possibly appealed and remanded) if the judge's decision is contrary to the higher court's opinion. It's basically an attempt to save the court's time and resources.
The regulations usually leave plenty of room for that. California's regulations match those of the ADA, requiring at least 36 inches and in many cases much more. I've seen some large wheelchairs, but none that could not pass through a 35.75" doorway. The problem, though, wasn't so much that quarter inch. It was the lawyers that would go around with a tape measure looking for that quarter-inch discrepancy and then filing suit against a small business owner who could either fight it for thousands of dollars or settle for a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars and still have to pay to fix the problem. The polite solution is to notify the owner that he's out of compliance and suggest that he get it fixed before someone sues him.
The VIN in the window is supposed to be visible to the outside so that police can do exactly that in part to match the vehicle to the plate but also for unplated cars. I don't know if it takes longer to run a VIN than a plate, though.
Unfortunately, the number of seriously obese people using those scooters has left a stigma to their use. It is not those disabled by injury or serious disease that use them most, but those who have allowed themselves to become fodder for comedians. Many handicapped people who do not have clear and obvious disabilities eschew their use for fear of being labeled part of this.
California was one of the pioneers of "public interest" lawsuits. The intention was good: allow those who see violations to sue to force corrections. This reduced the pressure on authorities to track every single possible infraction and encouraged those who should have followed the regulations to ensure that they did because additional eyes were on them.
Unfortunately, multiple law firms were using this as a money-making scheme, just as you described. It got so bad--people were being sued because their elevators were a quarter-inch narrower than prescribed under the law--that even those who supported the concept said that it couldn't be fairly implemented. The legislature responded by putting severe restrictions on it, and it's largely gone away.
Good intention, poor execution. But then, a lot of laws are like that.
Do you think a bigger risk for Iran is a Libya-style intervention where the European and Arab forces play a bigger role with the US primarily in support (plus a few Delta teams)?
And the prevailing winds would take the fallout into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Great plan there.
You mention "20 minutes after launch"... of what? ICBMs? Unless it were coordinated with Russia, Russia would potentially launch as well because the ballistic arc would go over Russian territory, and they're not about to let that happen. Maybe an attack by aircraft-dropped bomb would work (but would be a bad idea), but not ICBM.
They have a few Kilo-class subs, a few effectively midget-subs, eight capital ships, and anywhere from a couple of hundred to several hundred corvette- or smaller class vessels. The tiny patrol boats in TFS are a potential problem, but I suspect that our subs would have a few notches within a couple of days and the F/A-18s from the carriers would have a lot of surface kills to their credit. Then the US surface ships show up and take out the rest--if they don't succumb to the swarms.
Much of that was due to the idiot, Rumsfeld. He thought he could overturn millennia of wartime history in weeks and centuries of culture in a few months. He lasted far too long, and is much to blame for Osama getting away and Iraq turning into a quagmire.
The focus has changed in the last few years toward engaging small, unconventional units. It had to. New vehicles, weapons, and training got deployed in a hurry to deal with the rapidly evolving battlefield, and I doubt the Navy was left out of it. Some of that might be just keeping away from the docks until we have a better littoral force built up, and some may be changing how certain weapons are used. Others here have confidence in the CIWS; I don't have so much, but they may know more.
Van Riper seems to have handed the military its ass, and rightly so. I understand why he left early, too. But those lessons can slowly percolate through the military in peace, and I'm sure worked their way through even faster after Iraq went sour.
There was an attempt to substantially halt trade in the 1980s. By the time it significantly affected world oil trade, the US started escorting reflagged tankers, now flying the Stars and Stripes, in what was essentially a dare to Iran and Iraq, though neither seriously took the bait (Saddam's apology after the Stark Incident and Iraq providing a bulwark against Iran probably saved Iraq).
There are plenty who are itching to take out Iran's forces and leadership. Iran knows this. They will make the point that they can close the Strait, but doing so is essentially suicide, if only economically because that's how most of their oil gets out. The world won't stand for it, though, and a united force composed of European, US, and Arab forces would take action to force the Strait back open.
I think the losses would not be much more significant than in Desert Storm, where about two dozen US aircraft were lost with all but one shot down by ground fire. Iran's defenses are better, but so are the USAF's tactics, especially with the deployment of the B-2 and the Small Diameter Bomb. A handful of B-2s can launch more than a thousand of these, each individually targeted (with some overlap for critical targets), and wipe out a significant portion of the air defenses and air force. Unless Iran has figured out how to see the B-2, a possibility I won't rule out given their recent detection and capture of the drone, they will be blinded in minutes. Similar strikes would probably be used on the ports, backed up by Tomahawk missiles and possibly closer fire from F-22s. Once the air defenses are neutralized, the B-52, F-15, and F-16 fleets would be used for most strikes with support from the Navy's F-18s.
Iran knows this, which is why it's not so eager to force the issue.
Should it happen, though, there's an additional advantage to the US: Iran, unlike Iraq, has no neighbors itching to take over. It may be advisable to simply destroy the armories and depots and let the populace handle it, much as happened in Libya. We'll have our hands full helping out Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey in any case when the terrorist groups are allowed to run free in response.
The main problem seems to be Ahmadinejad. His own superiors seem to be eternally irritated at him. The people know that their economic lives have been ruined by him (though he maintains his power base by kowtowing to the poorest through price controls). The only reason he hasn't been removed is that it would invalidate his "election" and make Iran look even less democratic than it does already.
Khamenei is not Khomeini; the latter never would have stood for the antics of Ahmadinejad, even if their goal of a nuclear-armed Iran was the same. He would have put in a better-behaved puppet. Iranian politics are more complex than we sometimes like to think, and that makes Iran less predictable and therefore more dangerous.
Pressure altitude (your "wrong value") is only used above 18,000 feet. Anyone below that, instrument or not, is (or at least should be) regularly adjusting their altimeter to the local pressure which they get from either listening to the ATIS for nearby airports or they are given it by air traffic control. Even airline pilots who spend most of their time above 18,000 feet have to start adjusting to actual pressures when they dip below that.
Further, your position relative to the ground is one of the most important things in instrument flight. A lot of pilots have had improperly set instruments and thought they could clear the mountain crest only to end up in a closed casket a few days later. Mid-air collisions are rare; controlled flight into terrain is not.
If you ever fly United, tune in to Channel 9, which on most planes allows you to hear the radio chatter. You will hear them get the actual pressure readings when beginning their descent with continuing updates through to just before landing.
Speaking as a pilot, I care a great deal where I am right now because it may affect whether I'm going to hit another plane. I've been close enough to see the crew of another plane and felt safe because I first spotted him nearly two miles out and knew where he was the whole time, and I've leveled off out of a take-off to see another plane inside of a quarter mile and was shaken by the experience. I know that a quarter mile seems like a long way, but when converging airspeeds are in the range of 150 knots, there's very little time between seeing him and a collision, and I want to know when someone is passing 500 feet above or below me or is on a potential collision course.
We maintain distance (something that falls into your definition of "everything else") for a reason. My plane's max cruising speed is only about 130 knots, but the Baron over there has a max speed in excess of 200 knots. If we're both tooling around max and closing on reciprocal courses, that's a potential closing speed of 235 knots--4.5 miles per minute. If we're two miles apart, we have less than 30 seconds to see each other and properly maneuver. I've also had a plane pass over me close enough that I could hear his engine over mine, and that's the last time I want to hear that sound.
I measure where I am because that is by far the most important. Where I will be is secondary. The basic rules of piloting: Aviate, navigate, communicate. Fly the plane as it is, figure out where you're going, tell someone where you're going. Notice that the first is where I am right now. The second one deals with where I'm going to be, because I almost always have options, even if it means turning around and going back where I came from.
You're either not a pilot, or one who I don't want to be within 100NM of.
Drive space utilization. Mail flows. Interface utilization. Ticket response and closure times. Mail archive sizes.
We measure a lot of things. Some of them are used for diagnostics as well as trending. We also use them to predict when we may run short of resources and either obtain more resources or change policies or behaviors to extend the life of existing resources. We've found places where things looked fine because people accepted that they should be the way they always had been, but there was a bottleneck somewhere, removal of which improved performance significantly.
I'm not an MBA, so I can't give you the formal definition of metrics. I know that we are held accountable for the metrics that are generated, and that once we figured out what needed to be measured--which took some time--we were able to figure out where we were suboptimal and learned how to address them. But again, until you actually have some numbers--which will show where things are broken but hidden--you can't figure out what is optimal.
I'm coming from an environment where management wanted metrics. I was one of those who tried to hold back that tide because I strongly distrust MBAs who look for metrics. But two years later, I can honestly say that we've gotten a much better handle on our environment and the end users are much happier.
There is a risk to metrics. Yes, they can be used to get people in trouble or even fired. In some cases, this is a good thing, because some people truly are deadweight. In other cases, management can use it to make decisions that they don't want to make. In the case of my workplace, a county government, some people were let go because the budgets weren't there and someone had to go, and the metrics were used to figure it out. Did anyone get treated unfairly? Perhaps, but not that I know of. Most of those who were fired were those who couldn't keep up, and in some cases, while I wish them no direct ill, I'm rather relieved that I don't have to deal with them anymore.
Metrics are a tool. You can use them to shape a department or you can abuse them to break a department.
If you don't know what's wrong, how can you identify what to improve? You may be able to come up with a few things off the top of your head based on anecdotal evidence, such as frequent concerns about available storage or that tickets take too long to close. Those can perhaps be part of your initial focus, but metrics are there to help you identify trends, find the deviations, and act on them (preferably before they become a problem). If a server is consistently running at 50% CPU utilization, is that optimal? You can't answer that without a lot more data. What are the peaks? How long do they last? Does it impact productivity? How much? How expensive is an upgrade if it seems required?
A sometimes more difficult one has to do with bandwidth. Where I work, we were consistently hitting our bandwidth cap, which slowed everyone's access. Management didn't want to fork over the money to add more, so they asked my group to figure out why. We figured that e-mail was this percent, servers that percent, but of course the biggest was user Internet, and the biggest by volume was streaming media. They wanted us to institute heavy filters on it, but we pushed back, saying that while we had all these numbers on what they were getting, we didn't know why. Sure, a lot of it was LOLcat media, but a lot of it turned out to be regular training videos hosted by YouTube and a few other places that management had mandated be taken on a regular basis. Their filters would have broken the training they required. We also found that a few people were abusing it pretty badly, with one guy downloading more than a terabyte of various videos from some Microsoft conference. We managed to get the number of times we hit the cap down to a few times a week, but eventually management understood that we had to increase the bandwidth.
Get your basic metrics, figure out what they're telling you, figure out why they are that way, then determine what's optimal and come up with the solution. Once you have that stable, you can add more metrics and address other hidden issues.
Determining optimal comes well after you start collecting metrics--usually months after. If you've never collected them, you are almost guaranteed to find things in the first month (or even the first day) that will look stunningly bad at first, but are quickly correctable. Once you get things balanced out--if you can--then you can figure out what's optimal.
Getting management to understand this may be a chore if they're new to metrics or not trying to find a reason to fire someone.
I'm well aware of class names. That the others were of the same class does not make a name a tradition. Enterprise, Constellation, and Lexington are traditional names with eight, four, and five, respectively, US naval vessels carrying the names; Nimitz, with only one ship ever carrying the name, has not yet reached the status of tradition.
Forrestal committed suicide (or was murdered, depending on who you listen to) in 1949. The USS Forrestal was not even ordered until 1951.
Further, Forrestal did not particularly like being in the public eye and strove for obscurity. It's highly unlikely that he would have approved his name being attached to the ship had he been asked while alive.
It's very likely that they are using it for research, albeit military research. It's one thing to have a carrier, but another thing entirely to know how to use it. You can't just put planes on a ship and expect to rule the area. China is decades behind in this way, and they know they need to get caught up if they're going to match India for regional naval influence (matching the US is another matter entirely). They have to figure out tactics and strategy for the escorts, effective logistics to keep a carrier battle-worthy, and emergency responses to handle battle or accident damage. Most of these can be figured out without ever configuring the ship for battle.
The US, meanwhile, is the foremost carrier user and has been since the end of World War II. Logistics, supply lines, training, emergency procedures, strategy and tactics, and risk analysis are all far ahead of the Chinese. Losing a carrier in a single task force is akin to worse than losing battleship core from pre-WWII fleets, as there is no way for the escorts to make up the range, accuracy, or firepower lost, which is why China has published papers discussing how and why to target foreign carriers should war erupt.
The USS Nimitz was named after Flt. Adm. Chester Nimitz who died in 1966 and is the only US military vessel ever to be named after him so far as I can find. A single vessel doesn't make for a tradition.
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They have existing cases that say that it's permissible, so operating on that basis without this judge ruling should be possible.
This is one of those things that should be hard (for relative values of difficulty) for police to do. They claim it would take LE five guys to watch him. My response is: So? If you want to get the guy, either assign five guys or get a warrant. It doesn't seem like it would be difficult to do if there's already evidence against him. That kind of thing doesn't appear to be invasive in the way that a black-bag bugging operation would be, and judges tend to be lenient with such requests.
Judges routinely hold cases where it affects how law enforcement operates. It doesn't always happen, but it's pretty common when cases are pending at higher levels. The FBI may have pushed for a ruling here because of legal uncertainties, but it suggests something in how widespread warrantless GPS tracking may be if this decision throws off the entire agency.
The NDAA has yet to be challenged. While you seem to have already decided how a future court (which may or may not look like the current court) will decide it, it's very hard to guess where some justices will come down, especially on things like unlimited confinement for an arrest made in US jurisdictions. Chief Justice Rehnquist was in favor of California legalizing medical marijuana, for example, something that surprised many.
Back to the original point, the judge doesn't have to throw out a case. He can simply put the case on hold pending resolution at higher levels unless for some reason the defendant's rights (such as to a speedy trial) are being violated by holding off. This kind of thing happens fairly often. Even appellate courts do this when an en banc or Supreme Court hearing on a similar issue is pending.
Judges will usually hold a case where a higher court is hearing a case that could affect it to prevent it from having to be reviewed (or possibly appealed and remanded) if the judge's decision is contrary to the higher court's opinion. It's basically an attempt to save the court's time and resources.
The regulations usually leave plenty of room for that. California's regulations match those of the ADA, requiring at least 36 inches and in many cases much more. I've seen some large wheelchairs, but none that could not pass through a 35.75" doorway. The problem, though, wasn't so much that quarter inch. It was the lawyers that would go around with a tape measure looking for that quarter-inch discrepancy and then filing suit against a small business owner who could either fight it for thousands of dollars or settle for a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars and still have to pay to fix the problem. The polite solution is to notify the owner that he's out of compliance and suggest that he get it fixed before someone sues him.
The VIN in the window is supposed to be visible to the outside so that police can do exactly that in part to match the vehicle to the plate but also for unplated cars. I don't know if it takes longer to run a VIN than a plate, though.
Unfortunately, the number of seriously obese people using those scooters has left a stigma to their use. It is not those disabled by injury or serious disease that use them most, but those who have allowed themselves to become fodder for comedians. Many handicapped people who do not have clear and obvious disabilities eschew their use for fear of being labeled part of this.
California was one of the pioneers of "public interest" lawsuits. The intention was good: allow those who see violations to sue to force corrections. This reduced the pressure on authorities to track every single possible infraction and encouraged those who should have followed the regulations to ensure that they did because additional eyes were on them.
Unfortunately, multiple law firms were using this as a money-making scheme, just as you described. It got so bad--people were being sued because their elevators were a quarter-inch narrower than prescribed under the law--that even those who supported the concept said that it couldn't be fairly implemented. The legislature responded by putting severe restrictions on it, and it's largely gone away.
Good intention, poor execution. But then, a lot of laws are like that.
Do you think a bigger risk for Iran is a Libya-style intervention where the European and Arab forces play a bigger role with the US primarily in support (plus a few Delta teams)?
And the prevailing winds would take the fallout into Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Great plan there.
You mention "20 minutes after launch"... of what? ICBMs? Unless it were coordinated with Russia, Russia would potentially launch as well because the ballistic arc would go over Russian territory, and they're not about to let that happen. Maybe an attack by aircraft-dropped bomb would work (but would be a bad idea), but not ICBM.
They have a few Kilo-class subs, a few effectively midget-subs, eight capital ships, and anywhere from a couple of hundred to several hundred corvette- or smaller class vessels. The tiny patrol boats in TFS are a potential problem, but I suspect that our subs would have a few notches within a couple of days and the F/A-18s from the carriers would have a lot of surface kills to their credit. Then the US surface ships show up and take out the rest--if they don't succumb to the swarms.
Much of that was due to the idiot, Rumsfeld. He thought he could overturn millennia of wartime history in weeks and centuries of culture in a few months. He lasted far too long, and is much to blame for Osama getting away and Iraq turning into a quagmire.
The focus has changed in the last few years toward engaging small, unconventional units. It had to. New vehicles, weapons, and training got deployed in a hurry to deal with the rapidly evolving battlefield, and I doubt the Navy was left out of it. Some of that might be just keeping away from the docks until we have a better littoral force built up, and some may be changing how certain weapons are used. Others here have confidence in the CIWS; I don't have so much, but they may know more.
Van Riper seems to have handed the military its ass, and rightly so. I understand why he left early, too. But those lessons can slowly percolate through the military in peace, and I'm sure worked their way through even faster after Iraq went sour.
There was an attempt to substantially halt trade in the 1980s. By the time it significantly affected world oil trade, the US started escorting reflagged tankers, now flying the Stars and Stripes, in what was essentially a dare to Iran and Iraq, though neither seriously took the bait (Saddam's apology after the Stark Incident and Iraq providing a bulwark against Iran probably saved Iraq).
There are plenty who are itching to take out Iran's forces and leadership. Iran knows this. They will make the point that they can close the Strait, but doing so is essentially suicide, if only economically because that's how most of their oil gets out. The world won't stand for it, though, and a united force composed of European, US, and Arab forces would take action to force the Strait back open.
I think the losses would not be much more significant than in Desert Storm, where about two dozen US aircraft were lost with all but one shot down by ground fire. Iran's defenses are better, but so are the USAF's tactics, especially with the deployment of the B-2 and the Small Diameter Bomb. A handful of B-2s can launch more than a thousand of these, each individually targeted (with some overlap for critical targets), and wipe out a significant portion of the air defenses and air force. Unless Iran has figured out how to see the B-2, a possibility I won't rule out given their recent detection and capture of the drone, they will be blinded in minutes. Similar strikes would probably be used on the ports, backed up by Tomahawk missiles and possibly closer fire from F-22s. Once the air defenses are neutralized, the B-52, F-15, and F-16 fleets would be used for most strikes with support from the Navy's F-18s.
Iran knows this, which is why it's not so eager to force the issue.
Should it happen, though, there's an additional advantage to the US: Iran, unlike Iraq, has no neighbors itching to take over. It may be advisable to simply destroy the armories and depots and let the populace handle it, much as happened in Libya. We'll have our hands full helping out Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey in any case when the terrorist groups are allowed to run free in response.
The main problem seems to be Ahmadinejad. His own superiors seem to be eternally irritated at him. The people know that their economic lives have been ruined by him (though he maintains his power base by kowtowing to the poorest through price controls). The only reason he hasn't been removed is that it would invalidate his "election" and make Iran look even less democratic than it does already.
Khamenei is not Khomeini; the latter never would have stood for the antics of Ahmadinejad, even if their goal of a nuclear-armed Iran was the same. He would have put in a better-behaved puppet. Iranian politics are more complex than we sometimes like to think, and that makes Iran less predictable and therefore more dangerous.
Pressure altitude (your "wrong value") is only used above 18,000 feet. Anyone below that, instrument or not, is (or at least should be) regularly adjusting their altimeter to the local pressure which they get from either listening to the ATIS for nearby airports or they are given it by air traffic control. Even airline pilots who spend most of their time above 18,000 feet have to start adjusting to actual pressures when they dip below that.
Further, your position relative to the ground is one of the most important things in instrument flight. A lot of pilots have had improperly set instruments and thought they could clear the mountain crest only to end up in a closed casket a few days later. Mid-air collisions are rare; controlled flight into terrain is not.
If you ever fly United, tune in to Channel 9, which on most planes allows you to hear the radio chatter. You will hear them get the actual pressure readings when beginning their descent with continuing updates through to just before landing.
Speaking as a pilot, I care a great deal where I am right now because it may affect whether I'm going to hit another plane. I've been close enough to see the crew of another plane and felt safe because I first spotted him nearly two miles out and knew where he was the whole time, and I've leveled off out of a take-off to see another plane inside of a quarter mile and was shaken by the experience. I know that a quarter mile seems like a long way, but when converging airspeeds are in the range of 150 knots, there's very little time between seeing him and a collision, and I want to know when someone is passing 500 feet above or below me or is on a potential collision course.
We maintain distance (something that falls into your definition of "everything else") for a reason. My plane's max cruising speed is only about 130 knots, but the Baron over there has a max speed in excess of 200 knots. If we're both tooling around max and closing on reciprocal courses, that's a potential closing speed of 235 knots--4.5 miles per minute. If we're two miles apart, we have less than 30 seconds to see each other and properly maneuver. I've also had a plane pass over me close enough that I could hear his engine over mine, and that's the last time I want to hear that sound.
I measure where I am because that is by far the most important. Where I will be is secondary. The basic rules of piloting: Aviate, navigate, communicate. Fly the plane as it is, figure out where you're going, tell someone where you're going. Notice that the first is where I am right now. The second one deals with where I'm going to be, because I almost always have options, even if it means turning around and going back where I came from.
You're either not a pilot, or one who I don't want to be within 100NM of.
Drive space utilization. Mail flows. Interface utilization. Ticket response and closure times. Mail archive sizes.
We measure a lot of things. Some of them are used for diagnostics as well as trending. We also use them to predict when we may run short of resources and either obtain more resources or change policies or behaviors to extend the life of existing resources. We've found places where things looked fine because people accepted that they should be the way they always had been, but there was a bottleneck somewhere, removal of which improved performance significantly.
I'm not an MBA, so I can't give you the formal definition of metrics. I know that we are held accountable for the metrics that are generated, and that once we figured out what needed to be measured--which took some time--we were able to figure out where we were suboptimal and learned how to address them. But again, until you actually have some numbers--which will show where things are broken but hidden--you can't figure out what is optimal.
I'm coming from an environment where management wanted metrics. I was one of those who tried to hold back that tide because I strongly distrust MBAs who look for metrics. But two years later, I can honestly say that we've gotten a much better handle on our environment and the end users are much happier.
There is a risk to metrics. Yes, they can be used to get people in trouble or even fired. In some cases, this is a good thing, because some people truly are deadweight. In other cases, management can use it to make decisions that they don't want to make. In the case of my workplace, a county government, some people were let go because the budgets weren't there and someone had to go, and the metrics were used to figure it out. Did anyone get treated unfairly? Perhaps, but not that I know of. Most of those who were fired were those who couldn't keep up, and in some cases, while I wish them no direct ill, I'm rather relieved that I don't have to deal with them anymore.
Metrics are a tool. You can use them to shape a department or you can abuse them to break a department.
If you don't know what's wrong, how can you identify what to improve? You may be able to come up with a few things off the top of your head based on anecdotal evidence, such as frequent concerns about available storage or that tickets take too long to close. Those can perhaps be part of your initial focus, but metrics are there to help you identify trends, find the deviations, and act on them (preferably before they become a problem). If a server is consistently running at 50% CPU utilization, is that optimal? You can't answer that without a lot more data. What are the peaks? How long do they last? Does it impact productivity? How much? How expensive is an upgrade if it seems required?
A sometimes more difficult one has to do with bandwidth. Where I work, we were consistently hitting our bandwidth cap, which slowed everyone's access. Management didn't want to fork over the money to add more, so they asked my group to figure out why. We figured that e-mail was this percent, servers that percent, but of course the biggest was user Internet, and the biggest by volume was streaming media. They wanted us to institute heavy filters on it, but we pushed back, saying that while we had all these numbers on what they were getting, we didn't know why. Sure, a lot of it was LOLcat media, but a lot of it turned out to be regular training videos hosted by YouTube and a few other places that management had mandated be taken on a regular basis. Their filters would have broken the training they required. We also found that a few people were abusing it pretty badly, with one guy downloading more than a terabyte of various videos from some Microsoft conference. We managed to get the number of times we hit the cap down to a few times a week, but eventually management understood that we had to increase the bandwidth.
Get your basic metrics, figure out what they're telling you, figure out why they are that way, then determine what's optimal and come up with the solution. Once you have that stable, you can add more metrics and address other hidden issues.
Determining optimal comes well after you start collecting metrics--usually months after. If you've never collected them, you are almost guaranteed to find things in the first month (or even the first day) that will look stunningly bad at first, but are quickly correctable. Once you get things balanced out--if you can--then you can figure out what's optimal.
Getting management to understand this may be a chore if they're new to metrics or not trying to find a reason to fire someone.
I'm well aware of class names. That the others were of the same class does not make a name a tradition. Enterprise, Constellation, and Lexington are traditional names with eight, four, and five, respectively, US naval vessels carrying the names; Nimitz, with only one ship ever carrying the name, has not yet reached the status of tradition.
Forrestal committed suicide (or was murdered, depending on who you listen to) in 1949. The USS Forrestal was not even ordered until 1951.
Further, Forrestal did not particularly like being in the public eye and strove for obscurity. It's highly unlikely that he would have approved his name being attached to the ship had he been asked while alive.
It's very likely that they are using it for research, albeit military research. It's one thing to have a carrier, but another thing entirely to know how to use it. You can't just put planes on a ship and expect to rule the area. China is decades behind in this way, and they know they need to get caught up if they're going to match India for regional naval influence (matching the US is another matter entirely). They have to figure out tactics and strategy for the escorts, effective logistics to keep a carrier battle-worthy, and emergency responses to handle battle or accident damage. Most of these can be figured out without ever configuring the ship for battle.
The US, meanwhile, is the foremost carrier user and has been since the end of World War II. Logistics, supply lines, training, emergency procedures, strategy and tactics, and risk analysis are all far ahead of the Chinese. Losing a carrier in a single task force is akin to worse than losing battleship core from pre-WWII fleets, as there is no way for the escorts to make up the range, accuracy, or firepower lost, which is why China has published papers discussing how and why to target foreign carriers should war erupt.
The USS Nimitz was named after Flt. Adm. Chester Nimitz who died in 1966 and is the only US military vessel ever to be named after him so far as I can find. A single vessel doesn't make for a tradition.