SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe

I'm appaled to learn that DateFormat (and SimpleDateFormat) is not thread safe.

Not only that, but Sun has deemed any fixes too expensive to perform, so they won't fix it, but instead ask users to synchronize accesses to their DateFormatter.

If it really is too expensive to retrofit SimpleDateFormat to be thread safe, then at least give us an alternative implementation that is thread safe, so we can choose which one to use.