It appears "domain tasting" may be on the way out unless the registrar has massive amounts of monthly registrations vs their monthly AGP:
This snip from ICANN's site sums it up:
"AGP was intended to allow for the no-cost cancellation of domain name registrations resulting from typos and other errors by Registrars and registrants as well as some types of fraudulent registrations."
I got this from verisign yesterday:
Please be advised that ICANN formally announced the implementation plan for the new consensus policy relating to Add Grace Period Limits on 17 December 2008. The Add Grace Period (AGP) Limits Policy (the "Policy") was adopted by the ICANN Board on 26 June 2008. This Policy may be viewed at icann.org/en/tlds/agp-policy-17dec08-en.htm
VeriSign is providing this notification in accordance with ICANN's announcement requiring gTLD Operators to inform each of their accredited Registrars of the new Policy within 21 days.
VeriSign intends to implement this Policy on or around 31 March 2009. Any .com, .net and .name domain names that are registered by Registrars after implementation of the policy will be subject to the threshold limits established by the Policy.
Additional details relating to VeriSign's implementation of this Policy will be announced as they become available. Please contact Customer Support at +1 703 xxxx xxxx or xxxx@xxxx should you have any questions.

Here is an article about this that I saw a year ago:
http://www.dotsauce.com/2008/01/29/the-end-of-domain-tasting
Here is a cartoon by the Name.com resident cartoonist:
http://comic.name.com/2008/07/22/the-day-kitty-tasting-died

The biggest domain tasters are the registrys. Godaddy does it, everytime we cancel a domain with them and im saying cancel not let expire they put it up on their servers on a parked page with our contact information in the domain. After about a month they either auction or drop it.
Something tells me verisign won't say anything to GoDaddy:)