Am I correct to assume that most of you are familiar with the theory that birds are decended from the dinosaurs (specifically from the theropods)? 

I think that this theory is largely correct, however I'm not sure where Archeopteryx fits into the picture.  There have been many bird-like fossils discovered in the past ten years or so that predate A. lithographica by millions of years.

Well I thought everyone accepted the theory nowadays. Cryptovolans is an interesting newly (Well.. 2002 I think) described fossils of birdlike dinosaurs. Comparisons of bird and dinosaur skeletons, as well as cladistic analysis, strengthens the case for the link, particularly for a branch of theropods called maniraptors. I find it very convincing. Did you see Czerkas traveling exhibit Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight'?

Well there is some real news on this subject, a feathered dinosaur that is NOT a theropod:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/dinosaurs/5012159/Feathered-dinosaur-throws-bird-evolution-into-a-flap.html

I'm not exactly sure of the status of the theropod bird link.  When I was younger there were relatively few ancient bird fossils.  There was archaeopteryx (our avatar), ichthyornis, and hesperornis and that was about it.  Archaeopteryx was slightly more primitive than the other two fossils and stretched farther back in time as well.  Since then many feathers "birds" have been discovered and some of them were reputed to be simultaneously older in time and more anotomacally advanced than archaeopteryx though I havn't actually researched it much. 

I did a little light research on this (wikipedia) and it seems that the theropod-bird link is still intact.  Protoavis is the discovery I remember (from maybe 10 years ago) that created a lot of fuss and threatened to alter everything known about bird origins.  Protoavis status is in doubt and it is not even certain that it had feathers. 

Microraptor was the next new thing that I remember to challenge the status but this is clearly a theropod, and perhaps less clearly a bird.  At any rate it would not challenge the theropod origin for birds. 

None of the ancient fossil birds are universally agreed to be the ancestors of living birds--in fact most, if not all, are apparently dead ends. 

I guess I should not be too surprised that there is not much debate on the dinosaur-bird link in this group, after all the evidence looks pretty solid.

Here is the next question though.  Do you object to birds being referred to as feathered dinosaurs?  I know that some (perhaps even many) ornithologists object to this.  A few no doubt object since they rejected the evidence of the theropod link and I think that John Ostrom is a prominent member of this group.  However I think that most object simply because they do not want their lifes work, study and passion to be subsumed by dinosaur paleontology and I can see some rationalle to this point of view. 

After all we don't normally refer to reptiles and amphibians as "land conquering fish".  We also don't refer to reptiles as "scaled amphibians" or mammals as "hairy reptiles".

The reason why some people like to call them dinosaurs is because of monophyly. It makes more sense, at least to evolutionary biologists, to regroup all the descendants of an ancestor into a group. It's a shift from classification based on morphology to classification based on history.

Of course a lot of other groups aren't monophyletic, perhaps even crustaceans now that it appears insects have evolved from a malacostracan ancestors (I always thought insects were closer to myriapods, oh well...).