Finally!<p>The only consequence would be a very, very slow drift between the "wall clock" time and the time of sunrise/midday/sunset. Given that people living at +/- 30 minutes off from the sun-time (borders of current time zones) experience no problems at all, then we should have ~2000 years before the difference is significant - and by that time, hopefully, we'll be living on more than one planet and won't care that much about synchronising everything with the rotation a single large rock.
We already have several time options without leap seconds, such as International Atomic Time [1] and GPS Time [2]?<p>Why can't people who want to avoid leap seconds just use those?<p>If we switch to leap-minutes or leap-hours they'll be rare enough that software bugs won't get exposed enough to get fixed - it'll be like Y2K every time.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time</a>
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_time#Timekeeping" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_time#Timekeeping</a>
If you're interested in this topic, I recommend you peruse the archives of LEAPSECS mailing list ( <a href="http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/leapsecs/" rel="nofollow">http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/leapsecs/</a> ), where experts have discussed some of the thorny issues over the years.
It's cool to see the ".int" TLD for once---by far the most obscure of the original seven (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, .org, [and .arpa, if you're old]).