Nobody has come within several orders of magnitude of net-energy-positive (by which I mean for the whole process, not narrowly "more energy than was actually absorbed by the fusing particles") fusion so far. The idea that General Fusion is going to this year is fantasy.
And even your article suggests that they hope to start building a full size prototype in 2014, but they don't expect to finish until 2017.
Britain's JET is not orders of magnitude below net-positive output. I don't have the exact number here, but I believe they are near the 75% mark. The US NIF facility reached net-positive for a brief period last year [1]. ITER is projected to be net-positive at about 10x.
The tech is not here, but it isn't orders of magnitude away either.
They approximate that the actual energy input into the process at NIF (as opposed to "absorbed by the particles") was 422 MJ in for 14 kJ out. That's roughly 4 orders of magnitude.
I can easily concede that NIF results are too recent and still under scrutiny. However, JET's peak output was 65% of input, and these are results solid enough to justify scaling JET up with the ITER project. 65% is on the same order of magnitude, not four orders of magnitude away.
I know it was for a short period, but 0.5 seconds is enough to prove the concept, and this was the objective then. They did another experiment at a quarter of the output for five seconds, and both were limited by the design of the tokamak not targeting long runs (it's a scientific reactor).
I know this is now a pretty dead thread, but just FYI: you're again looking at the comparison of power output to "power absorbed by the particles to be fused," not power output to overall system power input.
All the fusion people are so far from being energy positive to overall system power input, and so far from even trying to get to that milestone, that it's a little hard to find articles that talk about the power input to the whole system. But, to use wikipedia, here's a link:
Note that they talk about Q. JET claims a Q of approximately 0.7. Q=1 is what you're talking about -- more energy out of the particles than is absorbed by the particles. Q=5 is potentially self-sustaining -- because, in this case, only 20% of the energy out is in a form that can create more fusion reactions. The article suggests Q=10 as the minimum for overall power output. My guess is that Q=10 is wildly optimistic for that.
You're not contradicting that they are starting a prototype of the real thing. That is, as you make a point of, quite new.
If that (and/or Polywell et al) will really work out is a bit early to say. The GF people claim to have solved the basic problems, bent a lot of metal already and are getting serious investments.
And even your article suggests that they hope to start building a full size prototype in 2014, but they don't expect to finish until 2017.