Matt:

>I had talked with someone several month back about building a PC in a 
>briefcase.  I was wondering if they had taken it into further 
>consideration or had built one.

In the mainstream market, the laptop has pretty much taken the steam out of 
any briefcase PCs.

However, there's a European company that makes a briefcase 
plug-into-anything video teleconferencing system.  It pretty much amounts 
to a PC with a camera, and more types of network interfaces than you can 
shake a stick of RAM at.  See http://www.scotty.at/products/index.html and 
look for the Scotty Mobile.  It's waterproof when closed, and supposedly 
will float!

You can also get portable satellite transceivers in a similar 
briefcase.  So your Scotty in one hand and satcom in the other, and you can 
VTC from just about anywhere on the face of the earth.

A ruggedized LCD panel is mounted in the lid of the "briefcase", along with 
a tiny camera and a speaker.  The keyboard is in the forward part of the 
briefcase bottom, and the PC guts are in the rear of the briefcase bottom 
and under the keyboard.

And one can be yours for only about $20k-$25k, depending on options.

David