I see this as a serious problem, in that anything that is out there without an explicit license may as well not be out there. For example, I can't find any mention of what license is required on http://snippets.dzone.com/. I come across this site frequently in searches. They claim to be a "public source code repository", but what's "public" mean?
Similarly on gist.github.com, though there people seem to be a bit better about putting an explicit license in their files.
You, as a user of these sites with a piece of code you'd like to use in front of you, can't solve this problem. In an ideal world, the developer submitting something would include an explicit license, but that seems unlikely. The best we can reasonably hope for is for these kinds of sites to force users to choose a license when pasting anything.
In most cases, these snippets aren't significant enough to have any commercial value or to warrant any restrictive licensing, but without an affirmative action on the part of the person submitting, it remains theirs, with all rights reserved other than those that have been explicitly granted to others.