...and it's bemused me too. When they bleep the audio track, you always know what the word was based on surrounding syllables, not to mention lip-reading. Nobody's fooled.

"Rough language" tends to evolve toward desensitization. "Damn" and the evolution from Rhett Butler's utterance is the classic example. Once upon a time "queer" was generally taken as an epithet, yet today we have TV shows like "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". I think the desensitization isn't really the problem that many people do, because other terms will move into the shock zone to replace the words that lose their impact. So this business of putting a fig leaf over "bad language" that's become routine may even be counterproductive--the bleeps and the asterisks provide an emphasis that gives greater weight to the words than they actually have in real life. Spelling it "f*ck" is like putting the word in boldface; the asterisk says "this word is important!".

Giving up the lame censorship would be, to me, common sense, but of course I'm not holding my breath for the bluenoses to give up their outrage. They have to be worn down like water on a rock.