You can use the 'sitewide' context condition to ensure that a context is active on any page of you site.
Further, you can use the fact the each context is evaluated in turn to provide a 'default' context within every namespace/attribute pair.
Let's suppose that you have a block that you want to show on every page of your site, except in the 'news' section. Here's how you could do that:
That's it! Context should evaluate your contexts and if the 'news' context's conditions are met the blocks it defines for that namespace and attribute will be used instead of the defaults.