>Ok, I get it now. The unary operator takes precedence over exponentiation because..... you want it to? I tried that philosophy out when I was in school in hopes of perfect scores on everything. Oddly, it didn't work out that way. ;)

Amazing all the opinions on "basic" things we're just supposed to have learned in school. This has been an interesting thread to follow.

Just to add fuel to the fire, here's another opinion of it:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53194.html