Alan,

Unary negation does have higher precedence than exponentiation! It also represents a subtraction from 0.

You can't believe everything you read on the internet.

>No David. In normal math, the unary operator does not have precedence because it actually represents a multiplication by -1. In other words, -2**2 is the same as saying -1*2**2 and since exponentiation takes precedence over multiplication, the correct answer is -4. For the record, I thought it was 4 at first too.
>
>Check this out: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/69058.html